Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is the latest biggest Yu-Gi-Oh! game. We will type it as Yugioh from now on. X35 Earthwalker has been playing Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel for a while now and has noticed many problems with the game and ‘modern Yugioh’ in general. Just for the sake of the ignorant readers, know that X35 Earthwalker is a veteran Yugioh player. He has played since it’s release, watched the animes and considered by smart people as the best player in the world who doesn’t use lame tactics. X35 Earthwalker doesn’t use meta decks. Glad we made that clear. Let’s take a look.
The main problem with Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is modern Yugioh itself. Yes other games suffer from a similar problem but it’s way worse in Yu-Gi-Oh! Meta! The problem is meta. Not all decks are created equally and that’s too big of a task to get done perfectly. There’s thousands of cards and so many decks and archetypes who specialise in different things so and can’t be equal. Even so there are things you can do but Konami isn’t smart enough nor top they care to fix it. Meta decks dominate in Yugioh and that’s a fact. This was the same problem in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links. Decks like eldlich, tri brigade, drytron and many many more. It’s so bad that some players instantly quit the match upon seeing these things. We don’t blame them. It’s not fun to face these decks. It’s boring. That’s problem one. Most duels in Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel are not fun because of meta decks. Some of these decks take forever to do their turn. They be special summoning more times than the number of bites you take eating cereal. Not joking. People have made videos on this.
Now why do many people use meta decks? Simple. Most are pathetic losers who can’t win by themselves and have no creativity. They are desperate for a win and so copy the most broken unfair decks so they can finally have some sort of success in their life. The community doesn’t help either. youtubers and streamers need to make new ‘exciting’ content, so they find new broken decks, cards or combos and show the world. The world then just copies it (card for card in many cases) as they always show the deck recipe. The smaller group of Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel players use meta decks because they are tired of losing. they try fun and creative decks but they get destroyed by meta decks (we know the feeling) so it’s a ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ kind of thing. We don’t mock or insult those guys as we understand the frustration. They aren’t having fun and no one likes losing all the time. So expect to face meta the vast majority of the time and for players to race to get the broken meta cards.
Now all this means that fun decks can’t be used. X35 Earthwalker has already reached platinum ranked without any meta decks or hand traps like ash blossom, maxx c and niburu. He has dropped rank simply because he began to use other decks he created that are fun, creative and different but not as strong as his more serious deck. He was using Earthbound Immortals! X35 says they are the coolest in the verse (game). While powerful, they can easily be stopped by those broken decks. You try to use Supay dawnwalker and boom, the brain dead meta deck using opponent uses ash blossom. You have been screwed. They might use maxx c, so when you use Ascator dawnwalker the get 3 cards for absolutely no reason. Not fair. While Earthbound immortals didn’t get any love. They are a major archetype that gor little to know upgrades or real support cards. The sacred beast cards got some crazy and even broken support cards and upgrades that make them almost unbeatable. Earthbound Immortals have no such help. They have many weaknesses. They can be destroyed, removed from play, targeted and AOE both work, don’t have the highest attack points at all, almost all their effects have little to no effect on the strongest cards who can’t be targeted or destroyed by card effects. Get rid of the field spell and Earthbound Immortals die. They have no link monster or xyz cards. Nothing broken or cheap. They also require two tributes to bring out. There’s also no get cards from deck to hand or special summon from deck etc. They are weak in modern yugioh and the meta. So no fun decks means no fun. You can try Earthbound immortals and other fun decks but expect to lose or leave matches in many cases sadly.
Another problem with Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is getting new cards. You have these basic normal packs which are always available but for the packs that allow you to target a certain archetype, which are the secret packs, are not always available. They are not there. You have to unlock them. To do this you have to open other packs and hope to get a super or ultra rare card that belongs to a secret pack which then unlocks the secret pack. Secondarily you could craft a super or ultra rare card that belongs to a secret pack to unlock the secret pack. That’s not that hard when you think about it… but… the problem is the packs are unlocked TEMPORARILY. They stay available for like a day. That’s it. That’s stupid. Opening packs one at a time hardly brings results. It’s always best to open 10 at a time which is 1000 gems. Getting 1000 gems isn’t easy at all. As getting gems is incredibly slow on purpose. Quick example. You have 3000 gems. You spend 1000 to open a pack to hope to get a rare enough card to unlock your pack. You get a card first try. You now have 2000 to grab 20 packs of the secret pack you want. That’s normally not enough to get all the cards you want. Once you are aiming for these cards, you don’t want to dismantle them to craft the specific cards you want. You have run out of gems. To try again, you need to get 1000 gems again to hope to unlock the secret pack and then another 1000 on top to just try. That’s stupid and lame.
Now Konami doesn’t want to fix Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel for obvious reasons. They make more money this way. Think about it. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know this already. X35 Earthwalker is the smartest person after all. People want to win, easiest way to win is to have a brain dead, retarded, yes to everything, meta deck. To get those you need the cards. You mainly get the cads through spending gems to open packs. Earning gems is really slow. What’s a faster way to get them? Buy them! Easy formula. Crafting cards require having cards to dismantle. How do you get cards to dismantle? You open packs. How do you open packs? With gems! Pay attention! We don’t like to repeat ourselves. So to get the specific cards or grab as many from a certain type, it’s all about the gems. They make so much money from all these purchases. Just like in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links, except it’s worse here. Everyone wants ash blossom, everyone wants max c and 3 copies of each of them. It’s all about money. The whole system is built around this, from the secret packs being temporary, to the meta decks dominating to how slow it is to get gems. It’s a design plan. Other games have done similar stuff like Raid: Shadow Legends. It’s all about making money. Game design is a business after all.
The rewards you get for wining duels are terribly lame. The legacy packs suck terribly for the most part. No excitement opening those. There’s no casual duelling mode where instead of it being ranked and facing meta brain dead decks, you can face others who just want fun duels with variety decks. Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel should have a practice duel mode. Yes we know there’s solo mode but a more dedicated mode where you can maybe select what deck you want to face would be great. There’s nothing really to aim for in Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel. We already reached platinum and it’s so not worth it, the reward values decrease as you get higher, the duels get less fun as it’s all dumb meta decks and the level of customisation is poor. There’s so much they could do with this game but they stay lacking. Also like mentioned before, but decks like Earth Bound Immortals need help and support. Hand traps like ash blossom should be limited cards. Not 3 copies of ash blossom and 3 copies of maxx c in one deck. Also the timer for your turn in a duel is tooooooooo long. You have almost 8 minutes to make a move. 8 MINUTES!!!! Why do you need 8 minutes?! Is your brain that damaged? Are you that slow that you need 8 minutes? It makes duels too long and boring while you wait forever for your opponent to make a move or finish their turn. We hate that when you block a player, they still show up on your duel record. In Duel Links they disappear from your record. Small stuff like that matters. There’s more things to say but we are keeping this short.
Overall there’s many things wrong with Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel but we do still play it for a few reasons. Very rarely you can have a fun duel with someone who isn’t a meta deck using idiot. A good duel where it goes back and forth and you bring out your big moves to shift things in your favour. Anther reason is that there’s so many cards, some we don’t even know about, which is cool. We won’t say more. Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel has so much to do to be a much better game. We have seen complaints from many people but since this is the current state of yugioh even in real life with physical cards, there isn’t that much you can do but there is some options still. Modern yugioh is far inferior to old yugioh. Now Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel may be the new big flashy Yugioh game but still is dull trash when compared to… the ‘Earth Walk!’
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