3 people found this review helpful
Not Recommended
0.4 hrs last two weeks / 407.0 hrs on record (370.2 hrs at review time)
Posted: 24 Apr, 2023 @ 7:51am

Overall this game is the best YuGiOh game Konami has released in terms of usability and cosmetics. However, that is a very small part of the overall experience of Master Duel.
As other people have noted before me, this game is not meant for people who are fans of the anime or how the game was back in the day. This game is played by the most competitive sweat-lords from all over the world, especially in the upper ranks of the ladder.
The closest experience to the "good ol' days" you can find in this game is in the Solo mode where you play against bots with different kinds of decks.

To give you insight in what the current meta game is like, if you do not win the coin toss and have an opening hand that can prevent your opponent from playing. You will lose. Currently there is one dominant deck and that's Ishizu-Tearlaments. Which allows your opponent to:
Negate and destroy a card that would special summon a monster (99% of decks rely on special summoning to play their deck) they also get a bonus of sending a monster to your grave for an additional fusion summon right away,
shuffle one of your opponent's cards,
permanently negate one card (negates typically only last until the end of the turn),
permanently negate a monster's effects and set it's level to 1 (which really messes with any deck that relies on levels of monsters on the field such as Rituals, Synchro and XYZ and to a lesser extent Links)
Also is able to shuffle cards from either player's graveyards to their decks which prevents the most common methods of trying to break your opponent's board.
And all this is possible despite Konami limiting how many of the cards from these archetypes you can play on release.

So with at least 4 disruptions/negates per turn most decks are not able to play at all.

Now this would not be an issue if this was purely limited to the higher ranks of matches, but since the deck is so prohibitively expensive a good chunk of people will create a fresh account and use the ton of gems the game front loads you with to make this deck and climb the ladder. For context, there are effectively 25 ranks in this game (which the game incentivises you to climb to get more gems so you can make decks you want.) only the bottom 10 ranks will not have you duel against this deck constantly.
Now, they had recently added Casual matches duels which lets you play against others, but you don't get any progress for your battle pass (yes this game has one too) or rewards for winning. So its purely if you want to play your pet decks for fun with less chance to encounter the meta (meta decks show up to practice their combos as casual gives you more time to play your turn).
Another note, at the time of writing this, about 1 week into this meta Konami has put out a special event that forces you to playing with only Earth Air Fire and Water in your deck. Which excludes a good chunk of the meta decks from participating. Allowing you to earn the rewards from the event and progress your battle pass. But the event will end before the packs for the aforementioned deck expire and leave the store page.

This game is behind on the card releases in the physical card game. Which gives us insight for future meta, which frankly, sounds even less fun, being able to lock your opponent out of using all but 2 card zones, you are left with 2 monster zones to work with, one of which is reserved for extra-deck monsters, so really you only have 1 monster to work with to get your entire strategy out.

If this sounds like a jolly good time for you I highly recommend you get into this game. For everyone else highly recommend finding one of the community-made simulators and playing with your friends instead.
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