Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel sucks right now – here’s how you can fix it

Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel is in an insufferable place right now. It’s dominated by a small group of extremely frustrating decks, Konami’s ban lists aren’t hitting the right cards to make it any better, and making a meta-viable deck is getting more expensive with every new archetype added to the game. 

Players are frustrated, and player counts on Steam are dropping, slowly but surely. The onus is on Konami to fix these problems and encourage players to come back, but there’s a way to make the game more fun in the meantime. 

But first, let’s set the stage. Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel’s problems come down to a few major issues, but most of them revolve around three current meta decks: Maliss, Ryzeal, and Mitsurugi. The specifics of these decks aren’t important, but they all share a few key components: they’re extremely powerful, endlessly flexible, and very difficult to interrupt. 

If you’re playing against one of these decks, you need two things to win — you need to win the pre-game coin flip and play first, and you need to draw exactly the perfect cards to not only set up your board, but have enough interaction on your opponent’s turn to shut down their plays. If you’re going second, you lose. If you can’t interact on your opponent’s first turn, you lose. Even if both of these things happen, you still may lose, because the flexibility these decks allow means they’re ready for just about everything. 

The reason these decks are as powerful as they are is down to multitudes of complex decision making over the last year or so, but in Master Duel specifically a lot of the problem is that they’re largely untouched on the ban list. Both the OCG – Japan and Korea’s trading card format – and the TCG introduced these archetypes in waves, with older, more powerful cards getting restricted while more flexible but lower-powered cards take their place. 

Master Duel introduced these decks in their entirety, not in smaller waves, and at the time of writing very few of the key pieces of the decks are restricted in any way. That means players have access to the absurdly powerful playmaker cards, as well as the more flexible cards that make decks more consistent, all in one super-powered deck that is both powerful and extremely consistent. 

The solution, for most players, is one of two things. You either pick up one of these decks, spending a truckload of gems or even real-world money to obtain the very high-rarity cards needed to put one together, or you quit and come back to the game when the meta has evened out a little bit. Understandably, plenty of players have chosen the latter, and the game has seen a reduction in players month after month for almost a year now. 

But there is a third option, and it’s something a lot of Master Duel players probably don’t want to hear: you need to play, and you need to lose a lot. And the best way to do that is to start pet decking. For those who aren’t savvy to the lingo of trading card games like Yu-Gi-Oh, a pet deck is a sub-meta deck that isn’t necessarily powerful, but is something you enjoy playing nonetheless. Maybe it’s got a fun resource loop, or you like the artwork, or you just find the names of the cards funny. In any case, pet decking is when you double down on that deck, knowing that it will likely never be a tier-0 deck. 

For me, that deck is Live Twins. I’ve spent almost a year playing exclusively a Live Twins deck, in part because I think the concept – a band of thieves who use V-tubing as a cover for their crimes – is very neat, but largely because the gameplay loop of the deck is very satisfying to me. I tried out the deck’s Solo Mode and instantly fell in love with the gameplay, and here I am, almost a year later, with thousands of games under my belt. 

Right now, in the current meta, I lose a lot. My win rate is a little over 60%, but when going up against a Ryzeal, Maliss, or Mitsurugi deck, that rate plummets to something more along the lines of 10-15%. Live Twins is not a great archetype, but it’s not terrible either, with a decent amount of flexibility and a lot of interactivity on your opponent’s turns. It also crumbles when faced with more than one negate, and is very susceptible to bricking.

But it’s fun. Even when I’m losing, it’s so incredibly fun that I can’t really be mad that I’m losing. And I’m learning a lot in the process. By pet decking this one specific deck for such a long time, I’ve learned exactly what its strengths are, but also what its weaknesses are. I’m keenly aware of every card in my deck, what they can do, how they interact with most other decks, and when it’s time to call it a day and surrender. 

I’ve become a better player because of it, too. When I first started playing Live Twins, my skills were suboptimal, to say the least. I made a lot of mistakes and misplays, my deck was poorly built, and when things went sideways I didn’t know what I could do to recover. Now, I’ve refined my deck into its most potent form through a process of playing, losing, and iterating, and I can think of ways to recover and win even the most unlikely matchup. 

Those skills do translate across to other decks, too. I recently put together an Orcust deck – which is much more meta-viable but still nowhere near the power level of the big three – and after a few teething issues, I’m starting to feel comfortable with it. But I keep going back to Live Twins, because I’m enjoying it so much. 

And, despite my low win rate against these behemoth decks, I am starting to win more and more against them. It’s still an exceptionally bad matchup, but there are plenty of people playing these decks because they feel that they have to, not because they know the deck well or even want to play it. A lot of it is still going to come down to pure luck, but with a good hand and all else equal, a good, passionate Live Twins player can win against a bad or disinterested Maliss player. It often takes some exhausting galaxy brain plays and a lot of tight concentration, but Maliss can be countered in Master Duel, and it’s very satisfying when you can pull it off. 

I understand why some players don’t feel like they can continue playing under the current state of the game. Winning is a hell of a lot more fun than losing, and if you’re losing multiple games in a row, and you don’t want to play these three frustrating decks, it feels like there’s no other option but to sit things out and hope it gets better in the future. 

Personally, though, I think the best way to fix Master Duel for yourself isn’t to quit, or to give in to the dominant meta, but to find a way to have fun and learn, even when you’re losing. There are over 10,000 cards in Master Duel, with dozens of archetypes to choose from — you’re almost certain to find something you enjoy playing among them if you do a bit of digging. And someday in the future, when Konami finally gets around to fixing the problems at the core of Master Duel’s meta, you’ll be a better duelist with a deck you love playing that might actually get to survive for more than a turn or two.