YMMV / Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel

• Alt-itis: Because of how many Gems the game hands you at the start, some players prefer having alternate accounts for trying out different decks over spending time grinding for Gems on their main account. Players of the Unlimited format particularly enjoy this as it gives them more wiggle room for spending on banned cards to be used in legacy formats, which would otherwise be quite wasteful if spent on a main account.
• Americans Hate Tingle: There's a non-insignificant number of Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG players who treat Master Duel as a card game format as inferior, citing not only the existence of Maxx "C" and its ramifications on the format as unhealthy but also its best-of-1 Ranked Duel system inherently increasing the luck-based factor of duels and its bizarre card pool updates.
• Awesome Levels:
  • The "World Legacy" Solo Gate is praised as one of the best Gates in the game so far, as it is a four-part Solo Gate (the largest in the game by far) which outlines the entire World Legacy subplot and helps avert All There in the Manual for the card lore, bringing together a grand science fantasy adventure into an easy-to-digest and fully playable scenario with great artwork and cards. The final mandatory Duel in the fourth sub-gate is a showcase of spectacle, as you're piloting a Crusadia-Orcust hybrid against a Knightmare-Krawler hybrid, both sides having their share of the World Legacies, as an adaptation of the climactic clash for the divine powers.
  • The Vendread Solo Gate goes beyond the standard "lore dump" of most other gates to illustrate the story of Revendread Slayer's struggles against the horde.
• Awesome Music: The game's soundtrack, composed by Yasunori Nishiki of Octopath Traveler fame, is a wonder to behold and fits perfectly to the tension and speed of dueling. The game's use of Variable Mix also keeps the blood pumping when players bring out their key cards and get close to a victory.
  • The title screen theme has a very sweeping feel to it, like you're about to embark on a journey. Fittingly, you also hear it during the tutorial.
  • The main menu theme has a subtle intensity to it. It's as if it's anticipating something incredible is going to happen.
  • The Monarch battle themes, "Balance of Judgement", "Holactie the Creator of Light", and "Call of the Haunted", incorporate an chorus that gives an operatic feel to the duels.
  • Several key card themes really give the feeling that the duel has kicked into high gear.
    • "Mirror Force" includes a prominent guitar and faster-paced orchestra, giving the impression that things have gotten real.
    • "Solemn Judgement" includes ominous chanting. Fitting if you find yourself backed into a corner.
    • "Legacy of the Duelist" has an adventurous feel to it.
    • "Rivalry of the Warlords" starts with a punctuated percussion and choral part, and only manages get more dramatic from there.
  • The climax themes reflect the tension at that point, where you're either close to victory or hanging on by a thread.
    • This unnamed theme includes an intense horn and dramatic chorus, which gives the feeling that time is rapidly running out.
    • "Charge of the Light Brigade" includes a wind part that has a hopeful feel to it.
    • "Last Turn" uses a variety of instruments in a way that gives the impression that this truly is the last turn.
• Breather Level:
  • The final tutorial duel gives you Ai's "@Ignister" deck from the third season of Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS against a "Predaplant" deck. With even a basic knowledge of how the deck functions, it's pretty easy to lock down your opponent and come out on top.
  • The final duel of the Herald-focused Solo Gate gives the player a fully-powered Drytron-Herald hybrid deck, which was one of the most powerful decks in Ranked Duels in early 2022. While missing out on some combo pieces, the tools it has available are more than enough to easily stomp the AI into the ground.
  • The final duel in the Shiranui Gate is against a strong deck that focuses on "Shaddoll" and has a potential to fuse away your monsters with "Super Polymerization". Your loaner deck, however, is a hybrid of "Shiranui"... and "Eldlich". It's very easy to completely lock down the opponent before they can get their fusions going with Eldlich's mixture of defensive options and its ability to save itself from the Graveyard.
  • The second SP Gate Duel series is focused on the different duels of Jaden Yuki. While the difficulty of the duels vary based on whether you draw your modern HERO cards and if the opponent can use their own cards effectively, the fifth and eighth duels are surprisingly easy. The former pits you against a horrendous Arcana Force deck without any Extra Deck cards, while the latter has a mishmash of Crystal Beasts, Yubel, and Sacred Beasts. Even though you're also stuck with an inconsistent loaner in both matches, it still has a HERO/Neo-Spacian focus with workable synergy that's generally better than what your opponent is using.
• Broken Base: As a new take on the Yu-Gi-Oh card-game, it was inevitable that arguments would pop-up between players regarding etiquette and playstyles. Below are some of the issues that generate the most heated discussions in the game.
  • Surrendering in the opponent's turn. Some players will argue that the opponent is not entitled to be able to complete combos and get a "legitimate" win if they play a combo-heavy deck that spends a lot of time setting up unbreakable boards, while others will argue that Yu-Gi-Oh is an incredibly volatile game, and that attempting to save time by jumping straight to the Battle Phase with a sub-optimal board just leaves you open to a comeback by the opponent. Both sides will accuse each other of being examples of ""Stop Having Fun" Guys", and being upset at their opponent's actions. The issue is also muddled because of real-life etiquette, which encourages surrendering to save time, whereas Master Duel has missions that encourage Battle Phase-based interactions, such as destroying monsters in battle and dealing damage. Arguments were eventually quelled (or at least, significantly reduced) after the Battle Phase-based mission requirements were reduced by half, and being removed altogether a few months later.
  • Sandbagging^note Staying in lower ranks by tanking your win rate, "suiciding"^note Losing on purpose in order to speed up the acquisition of gems in events and other strategies that run counter-intuitive to gameplay. Supporters assert that anything is fair in the pursuit of getting gems and increasing your own fun while playing the game, that staying in lower ranks increases the diversity of decks you can play and oppose, and that players that take issue with this approach are tryhards that suck the fun out of the game. Detractors argue that the players that use these strategies only take their own fun into account, leading to the lower ranks being filled with the same "meta" decks that these players complain about as players get frustrated with their own winrate, and that playing suicide decks runs counter to the spirit of the events, sucking the fun out of the game.
  • "Floodgate" cards are already a divisive topic in the normal card game, but it's especially bad in Master Duel where playing around them is much more difficult when you cannot have a Side Deck and thus must pack as many answers as possible to as many decks as possible into your Main Deck without affecting your consistency. Some players abide by them as excellent counters to common meta decks and their ability to quickly and easily win games due to shutting down their opponent's ability to play, while others consider them extremely unhealthy for a format where not everyone can run backrow removal and believe they need to be banned for how frustrating and unfun they are.
  • Playing "meta" decks in Casual Match. Many people say that you get to learn to play with or against a strong deck without any stakes at hand, while others complain that if you're so interested in winning that you might as well play Ranked, since Casual frequently is full of people playing inherently bad or gimmicky decks without the stress of needing to win. Some argue that it's the best way to learn your combos against a real opponent, but is frequently balked with how people Rage Quit if they feel they don't have any chance against a certain archetype, thus ending the duel prematurely.
  • In the midst of the dominance of the "Tearlaments" archetype, Konami made an extremely controversial banlist decision in the form of banning "Terraforming", a card that has been around for over 20+ years and has never been banned in either the TCG or OCG despite the increasing power level of Field Spells. Detractors complained that the ban unnecessarily punishes virtually every other deck in the game with minimal impact to the top decks, while defenders argue that a costless generic consistency card that functionally serves as an extra copy of any Field Spell in your Deck and is searchable by "Triple Tactics Thrust" is extraordinarily powerful in this day and age and deserved to be hit regardless of whether or not "Tearlaments" are specifically to blame.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The upper echelons of Ranked Duel are dominated by the same 2-3 decks that rotate to reflect past metas as cards get ported into the game. This problem is exacerbated by the Duelist Cup, which heavily incentivizes winning without any additional rules to differentiate it from Ranked play. Earning the final segment of the first round's rewards ladder requires the most effort and becomes the most grueling experience.
    • The August 2022 Duelist Cup became teeming with popular strategies like Halq-Auroradon combos, Virtual World and Prank-Kids. Those three, by the way, ended up dominating the top of the Duelist Cup ladder, and the strongest combo pieces or boss monsters associated with them would get banned afterwards.
    • The December 2022 Cup is flooded with Branded Despia (an incredibly resilient Fusion-based setup that can recycle its material and its strong boss monsters) and Runicks (banishing mill deck that is almost exclusively Quick-Play spells that is unaffected by popular monster-targeted negates).
    • The March 2023 Cup is filled with Spright variants, which was by far the strongest archetype at the time.
    • The higher ranks of the WCS 2023 Qualifers was filled with Ishizu Tearlaments and Decks specialized to counter them.
    • The October 2023 Cup was dominated by Kashtira and Purrely decks, the first of which remained a very popular strategy despite previous hits, and the abundance of targeted counters such as Kaijus or Book of Moon.
    • The December 2023 Cup was functionally much more diverse than previous Duelist Cups. In addition to Purrely, other notable strategies that saw high play included Vanquish Soul, Branded, and Mathmech/Cyberse, all of which had benefited from recent support. Stage 2 saw a huge spike in Runick Stun decks seeking to steal free wins from players as at that point the Seasonal Points system had been implemented and thus World Championship tickets were on the line, motivating a much larger number of players to win with the path of least resistance.
    • The March 2024 Cup was filled with Snake-Eyes Decks, followed by Superheavy Samurai and Labrynth, all of which had received support in the past few packs. This was before Bonfire and Arias the Labrynth Butler were added to the game. Similarly to the Ritual Festival, this created an interesting triangle where typically Labrynth could lockdown Superheavy, Superheavy could play through Snake-Eyes, and Snake-Eyes could break through Labrynth.
    • Actual game notwithstanding, it is extremely common for the several highest ranked players in Duelist Cup Stage 2 to switch to default cosmetics and a shared generic player name (such as "player") in order to prevent opponents from immediately identifying their deck and thus counterplay to their strategy. This was later rendered obsolete due to a 2024 update standardizing this as a built-in feature in Duelist Cup Stage 2.
  • "Branded" and "Mathmech" (and Cyberse decks in general) managed to squeeze their way into meta relevance earlier than in paper formats in late 2022/early 2023 due to getting key power cards from Power of the Elements without "Spright" or "Tearlaments" to bother them, giving them a leg up over the competition when the rest of the format was still catching up to previous sets.
  • Similarly, "Runick" uniquely enjoyed success where it did not in either the OCG or TCG. In paper formats, Runick (alongside "Labrynth" and "Vaylantz") had the misfortune of being released right before (in the OCG) or right after (in the TCG) Power of the Elements, which amped up the Power Creep so much that it rendered the archetype mostly irrelevant. In Master Duel, however, Tactical Masters was unleashed into the game several months before "Spright" or "Tearlaments" due to the game's unusual release schedule. This, combined with Runick being a Mechanically Unusual Fighter capable of running loads of floodgates, allowed the deck to go hog wild in Ranked in late 2022/early 2023, much to the chagrin of players everywhere.
  • During the Xyz Festival event, people frequently ran "SelfTK" and "Numeron" decks. Thanks to the way the rewards system worked before Konami changed it, it was more efficient for budget players to make a cheap SelfTK deck to lose as fast as possible while still receiving participation awards. "Numeron" was a more legitimate way to play within the spirit of the event, though it was also inexpensive and led to fast wins.
  • The dominant decks for the N/R Rarity Festival event were "Megalith" and "Metalfoes", both combo decks mostly comprised of N/R cards that are powerful in a meta without handtraps. Honorable mentions include "Number 97: Draglubion", which can easily be churned out by any deck that can level modulate to Level 8, and "Number 92: Heart-eartH Dragon", which can be summoned by the effect of "Draglubion", has battle immunity and damage reflect, and can banish all cards your opponent controls that were Summoned or Set that turn during their End Phase.
  • After the Xyz Festival resulted in most self-burning cards being banned, many players in subsequent events (such as Synchro Festival and Fusion Festival) shifted over to playing "True Draco", a control deck that is inexpensive, does not need its Extra Deck to play, is relatively resilient to disruption, consistently puts monsters with high stats on the board, and generates card advantage during their opponent's turn with monster effects. Inexplicably, despite being one of the few non-Ritual archetypes to not actually interact with the Extra Deck whatsoever, it has yet to be banned in an Event (besides N/R Festival), with a handful of cards being Limited to 1 at worst.
  • The Extra Zero Festival had a lot of "Floowandereeze" players due to being one of the most powerful decks for the format (it also had a Loaner Deck featuring the archetype). Another popular deck was "Ben Kei OTK", a going second OTK beatdown deck that uses "Armed Samurai - Ben Kei", "Mataza the Zapper" and a ton of Equip Spells to boost the monsters' ATK high enough to deliver lethal while ignoring most lockdown effects.
  • With most floodgate-centric archetypes banned and "Numeron" made relatively unfeasible, the Synchro x Xyz Festival saw much play from three decks: "Swordsoul", which still ends on fairly decent boards even with a heavy consistency loss (and also came in a decent Loaner), "Zoodiac", which can quickly spam out Xyz Summons for the event mission and easily gets "Divine Arsenal AA-ZEUS - Sky Thunder" out with a lots of materials, and "Virtual World", which uses both Synchro and Xyz Summons and can thus clean out both the Synchro Summon and Xyz Summon missions at the same time.
  • The Link Festival has no loaners available, but you're bound to see people running "Salamangreat" (had a newly-released Structure Deck at the time) and "Marincess" (whose support was introduced in a recent Selection Pack) decks. Other strong contenders included "Live Twin", "Sky Striker", "Dragon Link", "Tri-Brigade", and "Trickstar".
  • The Theme Chronicle event is focused around the Solo Gate cards, which are generally much lower power than the typical Yu-Gi-Oh! game. The World Legacy archetypes are notable for being more modern than most of the other Solo Gates, giving rise to decks such as "Orcust" (incredible grind game and can churn out very powerful Links) and "Crusadia" (going second OTK deck that can easily cheat out a win if the opponent plays a monster on their first turn). Surprisingly, "Gunkan Suship" also saw a dramatic spike in play as an alternative going second deck, since the deck is very cheap to build, the deck's cards were weak enough to dodge the event banlist, and the deck can easily slap multiple Xyz Monsters on the board for lethal damage without having the same weaknesses as "Crusadia".
  • The Legend Anthology event primarily focuses on cards that appeared in the anime (with a few additional stragglers), and uniquely, is the first event to ban and limit most relevant handtraps in the game save for Effect Veiler (which was used by Yusei in 5D's). This led to a large variety of decks appearing in the format, but of particular note were the ARC-V decks, Declan's D/D/Ds, which were barely hit by the event banlist and even allowed to play Abyss King Gilgamesh, and Ruri's Lyrilusc, which are very cheap and able to consistently put up a fight against the vast majority of other decks.
  • Tryout Duels are less "competitive" than the other events, offering a small one-time reward at three wins. Despite this, expect the players to gravitate towards one kind of strategy:
    • Rental Duel 1: The Xyz deck was considered far and away the best of the three. While it was still prone to bricking, the fact that Xyz Summoning is a much more flexible mechanic means that a half-decent hand can lead to easy OTKs. The same can't be said for its Fusion and Synchro competitors, which need to draw significantly better hands to get an explosive ceiling.
    • Rental Duel 2: The decks this time were significantly more improved and had a far greater variety in them making them a bit more usable. G Golem was a deck that could pump out a 3400 beater that is immune to monster effects and negates all of your opponent's face-up cards if destroyed, but was prone to bricking. Gem-Knight, while not as powerful still has very high OTK potential and quickly floods the field with big beaters with decent effects. Unfortunately, that left the short end of the stick to Crystal Beasts, where despite having various tools to get to their strongest cards like Rainbow Overdragon, was frequently caught in a slow resource game that could not keep up or out problematic cards.
    • Build-a-Deck 1: Due to the inherent volatility of gamble cards and the poor quality and lack of coherence of the provided Rental Cards, a vast majority of players forgo building around the gamble theme and just cram in their best cards (like Tearlament and Branded), essentially playing a 60-card deck with 30 dead cards and relying on their consistency tools to compensate.
    • The concept behind the Double Decks format was that you would build two different decks, one for going first and one for going second, and the game would automatically load up one of your two decks based on the coin flip. The result was virtually every going first deck running as much degeneracy as possible, including floodgates, FTKs, turn skip strategies, anti-handtrap cards, and other nonsense, while going second decks were almost exclusively dedicated to board breakers, handtraps, and OTKs.
    • In Extreme Duel 2, players start with 2024 LP instead of the usual 8000. This is a low enough number for any combination of two or three burn damage effects to immediately game end a player; the result is that virtually every deck revolved around racing to FTK the opponent first with effect damage and playing anti-burn cards like "Hanewata", "Performage Damage Juggler", "Junkuriboh", and "D/D/D Rebel King Leonidas" to prevent themselves from dying first.
    • Time Travel 2004 presents an alternative format similar to GOAT Format, so many players brought popular GOAT strategies such as PACMAN, Chaos, Monarchs, and Heart of the Underdog Exodia. OCG differences from the TCG card pool at the time also lead to alternative wincon decks such as Stall and Stall Burn using Marshmallon, which was not released in the TCG until 2009. Gadgets (which were also not in GOAT Format) also saw play since the ability to continually generate card advantage could potentially out-resource opposing stall/control decks.
    • Extreme Duel 3 creates a copy of "Nibiru the Primal Being" in both players' hands, forcing players to work around a known threat. Thus, they gravitate towards two kinds of Decks: ones that can keep combo'ing past Nibiru, or backrow-heavy Decks like the loathed stun deck, the latter variant being more popular due to how simple it is to play. Rare are the players who can stop on a good board (or put out a negate) before five Summons.
  • The first Monster Type Festival limited the card pool to Fiends and Fairies. There are very few viable Fiend or Fairy decks available, causing Labrynth (which had gotten new support in the latest Selection Pack at the time of the event) to float to the top by default due to being the only deck that was considered a meta contender outside of the event. Incidentally, virtually every deck that wasn't Labrynth started main decking Red Reboot with the expectation that they'd be encountering many Labrynth players due to this trope.
  • Due to a lack of solid archetypes playable in Ritual Festival, seeing Mikanko, stun decks, or cheap variants of Megalith weren't uncommon, but for the first time a Loaner Deck proved to be fairly popular, with the Nouvelles Loaner Deck seeing surprising success due to the archetype's decent consistency, relative resistance to targeted monster removal, high quantity of non-targeting non-destruction monster removal, and searchable archetypal counter trap. Interestingly, the three decks end up forming a bit of a competitive triangle with each other. Nouvelles utterly shut down Mikanko, Mikanko is pretty much impervious to Megalith, and Megalith neuters Nouvelles.
  • The Synchro x Link event in February 2024 is populated with Swordsoul Decks thanks to the Rookie & Returner campaign giving players the resources to build a Swordsoul Tenyi Deck for cheap.
  • In a general sense, whenever there is an event format that limits a lot of cards, expect to see a lot of insect decks run around. This is in large part thanks to them being a viable budget option while still being reasonably decent in more limited formats while also escaping most of the harsher hits that tends to impact other decks. A lot of these decks are centered around "Number 77: The Seven Sins" as their key playmaker, a 4000 attack behemoth with both a board wipe and inbuilt protection. And with the release of "Mother Spider Splitter" the deck gained a massive consistency boost on top of OTK potential together with "Number 35: Ravenous Tarantula".
• Fan Nickname:
  • Some players who dislike the Pendulum Summoning mechanic refer to their stats screen displaying "Pendulum Summons Performed: 0" as the "No Pendulum Badge of Honor" or similar permutation.
  • "Floowandereeze Festival" for the Extra Zero Festival, due to the event feeling tailor-made for the archetype.
  • Popular names for the Anti-Spell Festival include "Trap Festival", "Traptrix Festival", and "Eldlich Festival" due to the banning of Spell Cards causing Trap-related decks to spike in usage.
  • Craft Points are referred to as "dust" and the process of dismantling cards is referred to as "dusting", after the mechanic popularized by Hearthstone.
  • "Labrynth Festival" for the Monster Type (Fairy/Fiend) Festival, since it came shortly after the release of a Selection Pack that features Labrynth support.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links. Fans of Master Duel prefer the more standard rules, larger card list, and the crafting system that makes it very easy and cheap to build decks, comparing it favorably to Duel Links which is infested with bizarre Skill balancing, rampant Bribing Your Way to Victory, and reliance on "nostalgia baiting" via usage of anime characters and storylines to keep players engaged. Fans of Duel Links enjoy the less powerful metagame that is more beginner and newcomer friendly and makes it possible for both players to properly interact with each other, the fact that that all the player characters and several NPCs are given voice-overs, and that it gives the player more of an anime experience, decrying Master Duel for its overwhelming complexity and card pool, extremely advanced power level that is dependent on Complacent Gaming Syndrome, a questionable banlist (especially in regards to the very contentious "Maxx 'C'", which is Forbidden in the TCG, being Unlimited in Master Duel), and the lack of anime content.
• Game-Breaker: See here for general details regarding why some cards see time on the game's banlists, but also see here for ban decisions specific to Master Duel.
• Gameplay Derailment:
  • A frequent criticism lodged against festivals is how often players find ways to play against the theme of the festival, especially ones locking you to a specific extra deck mechanic. For example, in the first Synchro festival, most people, instead of running Synchro decks, ran True Dracos, an archetype focused on tribute summoning and sitting on floodgates to keep people from summoning out their synchro material. Then in the 2023 rerun of the Xyz festival, everyone ran Flying "C" to prevent their opponent from Xyz summoning, effectively making running an Xyz focused deck an instant loss in the tournament based around the mechanic. Though Konami does make an effort to make banlists for these events that encourage players to go with the current theme, the sheer number of cards in the game means that it's inevitable some will fall through the cracks.
  • The "Build-a-Deck" event restricts players to a preset but incomplete deck list, challenging them to supplement the provided theme with limited space. Problem is that the preset list involved the unpopular coin-toss or die-roll mechanics, the provided cards were generally pretty bad and had no central focus, and the players had no restriction on what cards they could use to complete the Deck. Cue players ignoring the gamble theme entirely and just cramming their best cards into the list, essentially playing a 60-card ranked Deck with 30 dead cards and relying on their consistency tools to get anywhere.
• Gateway Series: The game is designed to be accessible enough for new players and players who aren't familiar with modern Yu-Gi-Oh! to get a feel for the game without being pressured to spend money or being overwhelmed, and a good number of said players have been enticed enough to buy real cards and even engage in their local card game communities as a result.
• Good Bad Bugs: An amusing but harmless bug in the game can happen if numerous cards are triggered that deal burn damage to the opponent and one card in the chain deals lethal damage with more waiting in the wings, the effects can sometimes keep on going even after the victory screen is displayed. The Trickstar archetype tend to be especially guilty of triggering this.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Master Duel uses the OCG ban list when it comes to what cards are banned and limited. This has caused some whiplash among TCG players who play the game, due to it being substantially different than what they are used to.
  • In particular, Maxx "C" gets a lot of scorn from TCG players due to it being banned in the TCG but being unlimited in Master Duel, as it's such a meta warping card that archetypes being viable often come from if they can play around this single one card.
  • Runick gets a lot more flak in Master Duel than it does in paper formats. This archetype is built around using Quick-Play Spells to mill and interrupt the opponent, and can accommodate floodgates to restrict the opponent's ability to counterplay. It requires some Highly Specific Counterplay in a game mode that has no Side Deck so it's very difficult to prepare for without losing some strength in other matchups (also, good luck drawing the out if they've banished your outs), and it can be used as a hybrid with other archetypes to add some Confusion Fu to the mix. It's not a fun archetype to play against, and the limelight it got in Master Duel led to a lot of the archetype taking Limits and Semi-Limits, in contrast to real-life where it went almost untouched.
  • Tearlaments quickly earned the ire of a lot of players as soon as they were released because of their massive spike in power compared to any other deck available. Not even the likes of Albaz, Swordsoul or Spright could keep up. Only Exosister and Floowandereeze had a decent chance, though it's because they can use cards that target the Tearlaments' weaknesses. Due to their immense power level, it led to a very homogenized metagame with Tearlaments being everywhere, not helped by their playstyle involving a lot of effects going off at once, leading to long chains that take up huge amounts of game time. To make matters worse, if you're not facing Tearlaments, you're facing a Deck designed to counter Tearlaments (often including cards that keep most other opponents from playing properly), leading to an unpleasant experience regardless. This led many to outright quit the game due to being plain sick of seeing the deck because how omnipresent it was, at least until a subsequent banlist hit reined them in.
• Junk Rare:
  • While the game mostly attempts to avoid this issue concerning powercrept/old archetypes, the way archetypes are divided in Secret Packs means there has got to be something in that pack's SR and UR spots. And since half of each Secret Pack drops come from the Master Pack, this means that inevitably some of these cards will find their way into your collection. One of the most egregious examples is Drillroid, a Super Rare Level 4 Monster with the effect to destroy any monster in Defense before damage calculation. Two clones with the exact same effect, but different stats? Both are commons.
  • Archetypes released in Selection Packs have been accused of this. A combination of factors ^note higher UR proportion in Selection Packs, monthly releases and lack of re-releases have led to archetypes like "Scareclaw", "Dinomorphia" and "Libromancer" to have four or more required "mandatory" Ultra Rares to play, whereas the archetypes themselves are sometimes rogue-tier at best. It doesn't help that many of these URs are playstarters and consistency boosters that you need full playsets of.
• Memetic Loser:
  • With the glorious summon animations available to so many cards and archetypes, the D/D archetype has been the butt of many jokes among the fans due to them being a fairly big archetype that was also used by an important character in the ARC-V anime while still lacking an animation for any of their cards. This when even some infamously bad archetypes like Genex have at least one.
  • "Blue-Eyes", or rather "Blue-Eyes" players are the butt of many jokes. In a phenomenon similar to Charizard from Pokémon, the monster is incredibly popular and constantly gets support, which leads to many players using their resources to build the deck and bring it to ranked... which is where many of the jokes come from, because despite the support, "Blue-Eyes" remains ill-equipped to deal with most of the top decks in the game, leading to the deck's players being seen as the archetypical "Yugiboomer" that refuses to adapt and play better cards. This was especially exacerbated in Ritual Festival, where not only did they get a particularly bad Loaner Deck, but they faced a nearly-impossible matchup in the form of Nouvelles, which can stun Blue-Eyes players into submission with their versatile array of non-targeting Tribute effects.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The "Maxx "C"" Challenge.^ExplanationAn already existing TCG meme that became popular again, due to "Maxx "C"" being Unlimited in Master Duel. Its nature as one of the de-facto staples in the game, in addition to the game's popularity, has led to players posting videos where triggering "Maxx "C"" too many times ends up backfiring tremendously on either the player dropping it, or the one affected by it. The most famous examples are decking out the player that activated the card, and the ones where they end up winning through the effect of "Exodia, the Forbidden One".
  • Dark spellian.^ExplanationA returning bug from the GBA games where most if not all instances of "magic" were replaced with "Spell" made its way into Master Duel, resulting in "Dark Magician" and all related cards being renamed to "Dark spellian". In this instance, they didn't even bother capitalizing the term "Spell". The error was corrected quickly, but by then it had already become infamous.
  • People using self-burning decks for the Xyz Festival has led to a deluge of memes and jokes about what happens when two self-burning decks race to the bottom, or even when people counter such decks with decks that give the opponent heaps of Life Points.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! players can't read.^ExplanationWhile this meme originated from the physical card game, it's much more applicable in Master Duel where all rulings are properly and automatically enforced and it's very difficult to check lingering effects of cards. This leads to a lot of embarrassing misplays that cannot be backed out of, and some players are more willing to blame the game being "bugged" rather than reviewing their mistakes. Additionally, players lose the duel if they don't complete their turn within the time limit, further encouraging them to skim rather than thoroughly read.
    • Why game bug ^ExplanationA joke from Farfa mocking players who fail to understand a game or card ruling and then go on the internet to complain, only to be "politely" informed that they are the one misplaying and that the game is not wrong.
  • The 5 sized extra-deck bots/Rabbit bots/480 seconds win.^ExplanationA rather infamous trend in early 2022 is for ladder to be infested with bots all the way to Diamond. A quick Summary of how they work: Account sellers run "stall" bots with a "Rescue Rabbit" mate and a 5 card-sized Extra Deck — which is the basic setup any starting account has — whose sole purpose is to spend the 480 seconds of their turn doing nothing but stopping the game from kicking them out in order to make impatient players (or mobile players who cannot afford to wait out the timer) ragequit and quickly climb in Ranked for rewards to sell the account with. If you do not actually quit, after exactly 480 seconds they will automatically lose and you get a win easily. Many memes and jokes have been made about this, with a lot of players expressing dismay at how prevalent the bots are, while other players on the other hand thanking them and showing relief for being able to easily hit Diamond with the free wins. Some players even purposely disguise themselves as a bot to try and take advantage of players who think they're a free win.
  • Psychological horror. ^ExplanationFans noticed that Master Duel was tagged as Psychological Horror on Steam, causing them to joke about how appropriate the tag is because of the anxiety of facing powerful and unexpected cards and strategies.
  • "Thank you for playing Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel."^ExplanationDerived from how Konami signs off in-game announcements, and used to mock questionable game design decisions to make Konami look like a clueless executive that doesn't understand the game they're making.
  • The Imperm Nerf. ^ExplanationThe trap Infinite Impermanence has a clause that when it is activated on the field, all spell and trap cards that are activated in the same column as the original trap are automatically negated until the end of the turn. This often lead to various misplays involving a player activating their card in that same column and getting it negated, and it's doubly embarrassing if the Imperm's owner did it to themselves. In response to this, Konami added a visual cue, causing the column to briefly light up as a reminder of Imperm's effect, and players bemoaned that Imperm was "nerfed" since the misplays will become less common.
    
    Despite that, Imperm column misplays were still common, so Konami changed the visual cue again, giving the Imperm column a lingering glow until the end of the turn. At this point, players split into two camps: one appreciated the Anti Frustration Feature to help track public information, while the other opposed this change as it removes a punishment for the inattentive. Regardless, anyone who continues to make the Imperm column misplay past this point will be met with mockery.
    
    Reached new heights with the WCS Finals in August 2023, when Jesse Kotton of the American team still played into the Imperm column despite the visual cue!
  • Floo hit ^ExplanationThe "Floowandereeze" archetype has been the recipient of rather harsh banlist hits, such as their boss monster, "Floowandereeze & Empen", and their Field Spell, "Floowandereeze & the Magnificent Map", both being Limited, "Pot of Prosperity" being Semi-Limited, and their floodgate of choice, "Barrier Statue of the Stormwinds", getting banned. Later down the line, several generic cards wound up getting hit or banned, such as "Dimension Shifter", "Terraforming", and "Pot of Extravagance", all of which also make "Floowandereeze" worse by extension since it relies fairly heavily on said generic cards, causing players to half-joke that Floo gets hit every other banlist.
  • SelfTK ^ExplanationThe nickname given to Decks designed to lose on purpose without conceding. They first showed up in the first Xyz Event due to the reward structure — players noticed that they can get rewards faster by losing games quickly on purpose than by winning drawn-out matches. These Decks are also cheap to build, allowing a player to farm event participation points without expending too many resources. While subsequent events modify their reward structure and change their banlists to discourage players from building these kinds of Decks, they still occasionally crop up from time to time, piloted by a player who wants the event rewards without the effort of building and piloting a compatible Deck to victory. SelfTK always finds a way.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • Drawing a Limited card from your deck at the start of your Draw Phase is marked by a golden glow appearing accompanied by an angelic chime, which has the potential to be very cathartic if said card has the potential to win you the Duel.
  • The final blow of the duel is accompanied by a reverberating slam as the game dramatically slows down and a massive shockwave emanates from it, making the wins that much more satisfying.
  • As of the August 2022 update, winning with an instant-win condition is marked by a unique fanfare. It's certainly celebratory in nature of your accomplishment considering how next-to-impossible it is to pull off an instant-win against a competent player.
• Narm Charm: "Unchained Abomination" is a very intimidating-looking monster, and its mate incarnation has a fittingly eerie-sounding roar. However, there's something goofy, yet endearing, about the way this mate turns its head to the side to sound off with its roar as a duel begins. Not to also mention the fact a monster as imposing as "Unchained Abomination" has been sized down and turned into a mascot for the purposes of cheering on its duelist, placing it alongside much less imposing-looking monsters such as Ash Blossom and World Chalice Guardragon.
• Popular Game Variant: Some Festivals are very popular with fans for their unique and unusual pool of available cards creating equally distinct metagames and allowing players to use fun strategies and decks that would otherwise be unplayable in the main ruleset. N/R Festival, Theme Chronicle, and Legend Anthology are among the game's most successful events.
• Porting Disaster: The iOS and Android ports of the game are frequently lambasted by the playerbase for being so poorly optimized to the point of being almost unplayable. Not only does it chew battery like Taco Tuesday, but attempting to play with even remotely decent framerate and/or graphics causes mobile devices to generate an absurd amount of heat from sheer overwork, possibly causing lag or worse. The game additionally does not seem to appreciate mobile networks, as it is noticeably laggier on them than on other connections. These issues were eventually addressed by the July 2023 update, which improved performance significantly on mobile devices and made mobile connections smoother.
• The Scrappy:
  • "Numeron" is hated quite a bit in Master Duel specifically as it is an OTK deck that takes little to no skill to pilot and abuses the game's best-of-1 Ranked system to steal wins by stuffing half their deck with generic outs to most boards and then playing any of their 1-card starters to get Numeron Network up and swing for lethal. "Mikanko" is in the same boat since it also exploits best-of-1 to cheese wins off of better decks by Tributing over boards with big bodies like Lava Golem and Kaijus and still has OTK lines even if their opponent refuses to play the game, although it gets less hate than "Numeron" since it takes some relative amount of skill to play correctly.
  • Humorously, "Number F0: Utopic Future Slash" is disliked by players for appearing in the pack pull animations and oftentimes meaning jack squat in terms of pull quality despite its very flashy animation.
  • It is commonly joked that nearly every deck that even remotely approaches tiered status in any capacity becomes this, as a significant chunk of the playerbase is casual and decks that are strong tend to draw the ire of players as they are more common and tend to beat the weaker decks that many casual players queue into ladder with. This includes not only top tier decks like Herald Drytron, Purrely, Tearlaments, Runick variants, Spright, and Adamancipator Prank-Kids, but also several comparatively weaker decks like Branded, Swordsoul, Labrynth, Exosister, and Mathmech.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Master Duel unfortunately has several issues to it that might turn people away, if the metagame itself isn't risking that as is.
  • Some archetypes have their support sprinkled throughout multiple Secret Packs. While accurate to the physical game, this is mostly contingent on new product containing secondary waves of support for the archetype. Master Duel has no such excuse, which obviously means that Konami wants players to open multiple packs to complete these decks. The worst example of this practice is easily the "HERO" deck, which has multiple high rarity staples spread over four different packs, which means that a "HERO" player has to spend a massive number of gems and SR/UR CP to complete their deck.
  • Contrasting the previous situation, there are several packs that feature a pool of two or more small archetypes. While some of the groupings make sense to put together (such as Dreadnought Advance^note "Infinitrack" and the Train series and Miraculous Advent ^note Herald, "Megalith" and generic Ritual support), there are plenty of others based on theme alone and don't synergize with each other at all (packs like Hand of Fate^note "Arcana Force" and "Flower Cardian", archetypes themed on other card games, Prank Panic! ^note "Prank-Kids", "Ojama" and "Duston"; archetypes with cartoonish and mischievous monsters and Primordial Rising ^note "Fossil", "Paleozoic" and "Triamid,"; archetypes based on "ancient" concepts are big offenders in this regard). As a result, there will be plenty of times where your SR/UR pulls will be filled with stuff you're not aiming to/can't even use, and only serve to be dismantled.
  • When pulling for cards, there is a chance that the pack will glow to signify a card of a higher rarity: Gold for SR/UR, and iridescent for an UR. Occasionally, you will get a "flip", where a pack will upgrade to a higher rarity during the animation. Despite this, there is zero guarantee that an upgraded pack will actually contain a card of the stated rarity, meaning the animation's only purpose is to trick the player.
  • Legacy Packs, a.k.a. "free" card packs, acquired by spending tickets (as opposed to Gems) are generally terrible prizes; each pack only contains two cards, the card pool is almost nothing but garbage, and none of the cards you get from them can be dismantled for Craft Points. It is not uncommon to hear about players scrounging for Gems (mainly SR and especially UR) while simultaneously drowning in Legacy Pack tickets, or to hear of players complaining about multiple Junk Rares from those packs that they can't dismantle to craft what they need. It also doesn't help that there are plenty of cards that are exclusive to the Legacy Packs, which can be a problem if there's one you actually need since the pool they pull from is so big and the packs themselves so small, which basically means that they have no chance of pulling them by opening Legacy Packs.
  • For some inexplicable reason, changing your playmat alters the background music... for your opponent. In addition, it's relatively rare for anyone to have boards besides the standard board or the World Legacy one, so oftentimes many players will end up hearing the same few BGMs over and over and get nothing out of their Gem investment for the paid boards from the shop, discouraging players from buying them.
  • Chain link animations when playing/dueling decks that inevitably build big chains. Even something as basic as a three-steps chain link (most commonly seen in Floowandereeze, for example) will slowly add up, to the point playing grindy/long duels means you will spend several minutes watching the chain links resolve, frustrating both the opponent and the player. Chain link animations were massively sped up in patch 1.3.0, solving this issue.
  • Mission progress isn't recorded and Festival rewards aren't handed out if you surrender, regardless of context. It is entirely possible to have a game lasting several turns before you realize you've lost, and conceding would be considered courteous in that situation. It may be an Anti-Rage Quitting mechanic, but the game is basically punishing you for being polite and/or not wanting to waste more time. This can be especially irritating if you're in a situation where you clearly cannot fight back and are close to losing, only for the opponent to keep you around as they continue actions to grind rewards.
  • Festivals use your Ranked Duel ranking for matchmaking, despite themselves not being ranked events. While this does its job in stopping higher-ranked players from getting easy wins against lower-ranked players, it has the side effect of hurting those who actively play the game, as many players have found that being in the higher ranks means that they are more likely to encounter the same meta decks over and over again. This also applies to Festivals, which due to the limitations they impose, often only have 1 or 2 high-level decks. This was especially prominent in Extra Zero Festival, in which being in or close to Diamond meant that it was very likely that you either played or encountered almost nothing but "Floowandereeze" decks. Starting from the Legend Anthology event, this stipulation was silently removed, allowing players in Event Duels to match up with any other player.
  • The Link Regulation Event would be about as well-received as any other Festival if it weren't for the fact that it uses its own ladder system from which you gain the event rewards. The most prized cosmetic, the avatar frame, is also achieved by hitting the event's topmost rank as opposed to simply reaching Diamond tier V. Introducing a penalty for losing when the other Festivals didn't have one made the grind to max out rewards even more tedious, and most players didn't take too kindly to the event being almost the same as Ranked, Complacent Gaming Syndrome and all.
  • The first iteration of Rental Duels locked players into a choice between three Loaner Decks based off the protagonists of GX, 5D's, and ZEXAL, but all of these Decks were incredibly clunky, featuring single copies of situational or terrible cards that the characters happened to use in the anime. It's viewed as one of the worst iterations of the event; subsequent iterations had more consistent lists and were better-received.
  • Cards that have an effect to skip your next Battle Phase have an annoying quirk where you must actually declare Battle Phase (despite not actually having one) for the game to properly check that the Battle Phase will be skipped and you will get one after that. In paper format, this isn't necessary since both players simply know that the Battle Phase is skipped and will just proceed to End Phase, but Master Duel is particularly picky about this interaction and will not consider your Battle Phase skipped if you do not actually tell the game that you are attempting to enter Battle Phase. This is particularly annoying for "Runick" cards, where all Quick-Play Spells have an effect to skip the user's next Battle Phase, causing more than a few players to find this out the hard way.
  • The 2nd anniversary event included the "Rookie and Returner Campaign" where current players are encouraged to invite new or returning players to the game for rewards that include materials for a Swordsoul Deck. This is done by the newcomer/returner entering a unique campaign code, and the code owner gains extra bonuses for inviting more players to enter their code. If both code owner and newcomer/returner follow each other, they both gain the rewards, and there are more to be had if the newcomer/returner participates in Ranked enough to ascend past Bronze tier IV. While this is par for the course for a Socialization Bonus, players noticed that each newcomer can only enter one campaign code at a time, meaning that any one newcomer/returner who knows multiple current players cannot help them earn those rewards, and a group of newcomers/returners cannot help each other the same way. Players who want the most of these rewards ended up creating multiple alternate accounts instead of going out of their way to invite new players, and it's plain to see that this event was a way for Konami to jack up the perceived size of the game's playerbase.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • The one feature from Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist that does not appear in this game is a Draft/Sealed Play mode, where players open booster packs with pseudo-random results and build decks with only those cards. As such, players making up their own Draft/Sealed competitions with Duel Rooms and Gems is a popular pastime for content creators.
  • "Master Duel Masochist" is a challenge created by content creator Cimoooooooo where the player attempts to climb to the highest rank of Ranked Duel with a deck composed entirely of cards pulled from a set number of Master Packs, starting with opening just enough Master Packs to form a 40 card deck (typically 6, thanks to the presence of Extra Deck cards) plus an additional pack for each win the player earns with the resulting deck.
• Squick: Many players have noticed that the sound effect for the Hungry Burger Mate's "chomp" sounds disturbingly like flatulence.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The theme Call of the Haunted quickly drew comparisons to Keiichi Okabe's work with games such as Nier and SINoALICE, sounding like it came straight out of those games.
  • Similarly, the opening segment of Solemn Judgement drew comparisons to the closing segment of Xaxas from World of Warcraft.
• That One Achievement:
  • "Burn It All" requires you to deal a whopping 100,000 Life Points worth of effect damage in Ranked Duels. The best way to grind this would theoretically be to use a dedicated burn deck, but Yu-Gi-Oh!'s design philosophy heavily discourages using burn as a strategy to prevent degenerate FTKs, leaving them inconsistent and fragile at best. This means relying on cards that deal incidental burn as a side effect (e.g. Trickstars), but most of those cards tend to do so in the mere hundreds.
  • The "Demon" title is obtained by winning five Ranked duels on Turn 1. On top of building a deck and executing a consistent strategy to perform a first-turn-kill five times, you need to accomplish this before your opponent chooses to surrender, which can be at any time during the duel. So chances are if your opponent notices you're performing a FTK on them, they'll forfeit and you won't make any progress towards the achievement.
  • There's a line of Secret Missions that earn you a total of 400 Gems... but it requires a total of 100 Normal Summons of Gemini Monsters, one of the slowest and clunkiest mechanics in the game. To progress this mission you must use a Normal Summon to unlock the Effects of a Gemini Monster, and using cards to treat a Gemini Monster as an Effect Monster (like Supervise) will not qualify.
• That One Boss: Some of the duels in the Solo Campaign, when playing with the loaner deck, can really screw you over if you're not careful, as many of the loaners (especially in the later duels of a Solo Gate) are hybrids of archetypes with poor synergy when compared to the opponent's more optimized deck. Even Konami acknowledged this, balancing some of the most irksome examples. Check here for more details.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Prior to the December 2022 Ranked Season, there were two Daily Missions that were rather frustrating. One required dealing 16,000 battle damage, while the other required declaring 5 attacks on opposing monsters. The problem with these is that the modern game is often decided within the Main Phase; players are prone to conceding once their board is dismantled, before the opponent can even get to attack. Even after the requirements were slashed to 8000 damage and 2 attacks, this didn't change how hard it was to complete the missions. The December 2022 Ranked Season ultimately removed these missions and replaced them with "Fusion/Pendulum/Link Summon a monster" and "Ritual/Synchro/Xyz Summon a monster", which are far easier to complete without ever entering the Battle Phase and can be progressed even when going first.
  • The Proficiency Test has two components — Academic and Practical. The Practical part has tasks you need to do in Event and Ranked Duels, and like most other missions, conceding will not give progress to them.
    • Level 3 requires one Tribute Summon, which is a mechanic rendered unpopular by Power Creep. Most modern Decks won't perform a Tribute Summon except in the most dire of situations, unless they're focused on performing that.
    • Level 8 requires three each of Link, Ritual, and Pendulum Summons — that's "Pendulum Summon three times", not "Pendulum Summon a total of three monsters". Link Summons are commonly performed anywhere, but Ritual and Pendulum Summons are mechanics not favored by the modern game and usually require specialized Decks to perform.
    • The final Practical Task is a work in tedium and basically tells players not to rush it. Completing 10 Duels is routine, but destroying 100 cards takes a fair bit of effort, especially when most popular removal effects don't destroy and destruction in battle is even more uncommon.
• Unexpected Character: "Promethean Princess, Bestower of Flames", a card from the OCG/TCG Core Booster Set Phantom Nightmare, was unexpectedly announced for advance release in Master Duel to promote the set's release, subverting previous expectations of having to wait 9 to 12 months to play with any new cards released physically.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • Another big goal of the game is for it to be visually appealing to look at, and between the vivid colors, crisp and clear card and effect visuals, and impactful animations, it's really easy to get invested in a duel even when you're just watching.
  • A big draw praised by many players is the summon animations, which use Live2D to bring the game's gorgeous card art to life. There's not much else more cathartic than seeing your big boss monster spring into action in full-resolution glory.
  • The Duelist Cup duel field has a unique animation where the losing player's field crumbles away into a swirling purple void, which many players have likened to being banished to the Shadow Realm.
  • 2023 onwards would add special animations when iconic cards deliver the finishing blow — the card will hover and a special animation will play corresponding to its signature attack. This initially applied to Dark Magician, Dark Magician Girl, and Blue-Eyes White Dragon, but over time, Red-Eyes Black Dragon and the Egyptian Gods have received the same treatment.

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