Visuals, UI, and Sound Design
The game looks beautiful. High quality animations, well-designed menus, and an easy to use interface make the moment-to-moment gameplay a bliss. The first sight you see when you log into Master Duel is the main menu, from which you have several options. These options being clear and concise to the player is very important, and something not really present in the already existing Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links. In Duel Links you're not only bombarded by dozens of pop-ups every time you log into the game, but the user interface is incredibly unintuitive and hard to use. This is not the case for Master Duel.
Starting at the top, you have a "Duel" option—to play ranked duels or to make a Free Duel room. These Free Duel rooms can be used to either play with your friends or to run tournaments, with up to 50 players per room. You can also choose the Forbidden & Limited list to use, the amount of life points, what spectators can do, the timer for each turn, and much more. There's also an "Event Duel" tab in this menu, but that currently only says, "Coming Soon!"
Next we have the "Deck" menu. You can have up to twenty decks at the same time. This might seem like a rather small number at first, but in 30 hours of playtime I haven't had any issues with it. The deck builder is really easy to use and even tells you which packs you can open to pull certain cards.
Then there's the "Solo" mode. In solo mode you can play through fourteen unique storylines from some of the game's most popular decks (and also Digital Bugs). These solo mode missions give you a lot of resources you can use to purchase a ton of packs, on top of cool cosmetics (like a
In the sound department, the game really shines. The soundtrack is absolutely amazing and makes every duel seem like this epic confrontation to decide the destiny of the universe. However, while the quality of the music is top notch, there's not much of it. The entire OST is less than an hour long, so you'll probably end up getting a bit tired of these bangers. But sound isn't limited to music, not at all. The thumping sound that plays when you summon big monsters makes your cards feel like they have real weight to them. This together with the cool animations that show up when you play your big guys makes just playing the game a great experience.
Game Economy
One of the biggest challenges this game faced was the implementation of the more than 10,000 cards Yu-Gi-Oh! has. And I've got to say they did a pretty decent job at it. The only better option would have been to give everyone all the cards for free, but that would remove part of the fun of it. Basically, there are three Normal Packs, starting with Stalwart Force, which includes staples and some deck cores. You can find
So building a deck or getting a specific staple must be nigh-impossible right? Far from it. For this to make sense, I'll have to first explain the rarities cards can be present in. You have normal, rare, super rare, and ultra rare. If you pull (or craft, but we'll get to that later) a super or ultra rare card from an archetype or theme, you unlock a "Secret Pack." Their pools are 40 cards big and include about two archetypes and some support cards. This is how you build your decks. If you buy twenty to thirty of a single pack (probably less) you should come out with whichever of those decks you want to build.
Furthermore, the game stars the ever so loved crafting system. With this system, you may dismantle cards to get CP of a specific rarity, at a rate of 3:1, so three cards of a rarity to craft one of that same rarity. It's hard to overstimate how good this is. In other TCG video games, not having a crafting system really screws with the overall economy, making it so bad cards you pull are just that, bad cards you can do nothing with. In Master Duel, if you pull, I dunno,
All in all, these factors create a system that makes it incredibly cheap and easy to build a deck. In my time with the game (five days at the time of writing) I've build four full decks, three of which are top tier meta decks, and I got a couple more almost finished. Still, we'll have to see how the gem rewards keep up in the future.
The Cons
The game is great, but not without its fair share of negatives. First, the ban list the game plays by is a weird version of the October OCG ban list. I say weird because
Regarding ranked play, there are very few ranks and incentives to make it worthwile. There's only bronze, silver, gold, and platinum, with five divisions in each. This might seem alright at first, but when you reach the top tier in platinum, there's no reason or incentive to play ranked anymore. However, datamining has already happened and it's been found that there are three ranks above platinum not implemented yet. Not only that, but it's also been found that side decking is going to be an option. When you take into account that this first competitive season ends on February 2, my prediction is that when it ends, we'll receive the TCG ban list, best-of-three play, and new ranks.
On top of that, the English translation can be a bit lacking. Grammatical errors and bad translation quirks have been spotted throught the entire game, which take away from the overall experience.
All in all, Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is an extremely good game with a bit for everyone, which I believe stands above its rivals by a wide margin, even with its downsides, which I hope and expect will be fixed in short time. What do you think? Have you played Master Duel yet? What has your experience been like so far?
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily Cardmarket.