Honestly the game is very well made and fair to f2p players as well. The crafting system is especially great. However the solo content is pretty boring and ranked is just not fun at all, waiting 20 minutes while your opponent plays 30 cards is just not enjoyable at all and that's the meta now. Yeah I may be a boomer, but all these new effects past synchro just break the game for me. I enjoy games to be dragged out and when almost every duel ends in 1 or 2 turns, but those turns take 15-20 minutes to complete it's just boring and not fun, considering half the time is people just reading their card effects since most people just look up sweaty decks and play them without even knowing their effects just to be a sweaty meta tryhard.

In short: Play with friends and have fun. Stay away from ranked because it's the complete opposite of fun.

I'm a casual Yugioh fan, I spent an unhealthy amount of time playing Duel Links and watched the first 4 anime series (Zexal is the best) but never bothered with playing the actual TCG. Despite this, after several recommendations from a friend of mine I eventually picked the game up in March and I CAN'T STOP PLAYING IT. My backloggd account became completely dead once I started this game because this is all I play. Help!

As for the good, the music has no reason to be as good as it is. It gives of Persona vibes so as a fan of that series, it's absolute joy to my ears especially the Monarch theme. Additionally, the deck building is really fun, I love making archetypes I tried out in Duel Links like Six Samurai and Cyber Dragons as well as making newer meta decks like Eldlich. The game is pretty fair with how many gems it gives out in my opinion so, unless you waste your gems on useless decks that haven't been good for 5 years, you'll be a-ok. Also, the game just looks really clean, no complaints in terms of the games visuals and there's also a crafting system, so you don't have to bend over backwards to get cards unlike in Duel Links where making a new competitive deck would take months.

But the game is so damn flawed. It severely lacks content which is only made worse for me since I played Duel Links previously and that game never went a day without having some event taking place. In this game, all you get is a Ranked Mode and Solo Mode which you only use to get a few gems. There's really nothing to do aside from those 2 modes and the occasional event that takes place in the middle of the month (which are extremely poorly designed for the most part). The balancing can turn people off, it uses a modified version of the OCG banlist which has way more cards being legal than the TCG. A new player has to face so many crazy cards it can easily turn someone off from playing completely. Personally though, I love the OCG banlist, you've got so many more crazy decks and strategies to choose from that it creates such a wild and fun power level of decks. Once you build your first deck or two and can transfer the staples to other decks, the game becomes way more manageable and fun but I can't see a casual player sticking out with the game for that long.

Despite my love for the game, I can't see someone who never played YuGiOh getting much enjoyment out of this, but I'm still addicted to it and probs won't finish any other game until I get bored of it.

the best Yugioh game visually for sure and obviously by virtue of being the most recent game it has the largest card pool
I played it regularly for a year and without putting any money into it was able to stay up with the meta and make decks I wanted to
the single player levels are also very good and feel fresh due to being based on card archetypes rather than the anime even though while not explicitly mentioned those are there to
but with all that said i just got burned out on it and i just don't enjoy the current meta so i decided to take a indefinite break from it and i even uninstalled it

I would like to preface this saying that this will be less of a review of YGO the video game and more of a review of Master Duel as a client. I'll talk about YGO the game but it's surprisingly not relevant to the discussion of Master Duel. Also this post was made on 4/25/2022 incase in a year from now i'm proven incredibly right or incredibly wrong.

An important thing to note about Master Duel is that Konami was not just competing with their TCG competitors, but its own community? Obviously this is putting itself into the same market place as other classic TCGs with online clients, like WOTC's somehow successful despite endless complaints in MTGA and the pokemon TCG online client which is getting its own mass redesign in the near future, or CCGs that began and exist solely as digital clients, like hearthstone or shadowverse, but more importantly for a very long time the YGO community has had not one but multiple simulators for playing YGO online. Some are automated, some are fully manual if you prefer a closer to IRL simulation, card lists are generally up to date with new releases, customization, set up rules for older formats incase you saw endymion master of magic and damn near had a heart attack, and more importantly it's Free.

So Konami has to compete with not just the standard competition, but also their own community with an established and entrenched series of free simulators of their own game. They also have talked about it from an esport view, which would make sense because YGO has a popular competitive scene and WOTC has had a lot of success with competitive MTGA tournaments even though that game doesn't even have a fucking spectator system.
They sorta have to knock it out of the park. they... kinda do at first glance, but also they drop the ball really hard at times?

Lets talk good. First, it's definitely the prettiest of the modern TCG clients. A clean UI and presentation, all the playmats you can get look very nice, and designed key cards have fancy but not overly long animations based on their art when they enter the battlefield (no matter how many times i see it, seeing the board vanish and that nibiru animation flying on in never gets old) for a very refreshing to looking game. Not too much, still has some drama and flair to playing. It also has... a remarkably good soundtrack? Not something I'd expect to ever say about a TCG client but not only does it have good tracks but it also has triggers to change music for when keycards are played or a player's LP gets low. Again, it adds flair and drama that you can only get from the music suddenly changing and a fancy card animation shows up on your screen. I'd like more spell and trap animations (idk if there's ANY for traps? and despite all the iconic spells/traps in this game only monster reborn/black hole get cool animations), but in the 200+ hours ive put in this game I haven't even thought about turning the music off and listen to my own music like i do with every other TCG client so that's a W if you ask me.

It is also probably the most generous of other online CGs (i cant just turn this into the OCG because there's a very important YGO acronym with that so lol)? I haven't played them all but i've played a fair amount. It obviously can't compete with the totally free YGO simulator clients but i gotta give konami and slack and say they do want to make some money off this game. The game will frontload you with gems off the bat, and while the gem amount from dailies is pretty whatever the events they put out and pretty regular, there's always atleast one cheap deck you can farm with if you dont have a deck for that format, and gives out insane amount of gems. the daily gem payouts isnt even really that bad, it's just that you're better off just buying 10 packs instead of singles so you aren't like buying a pack a day like you would in other games if you were pack ripping.
By far the most important part is the secret pack system. YGO cards are mostly designed around archetypes and are made to work in tandem with other cards in their archetype, and many decks are composed mostly of 1 or 2 archetypes of cards. Secret packs are effectively "rate ups" like those new fangled "mobile games", where half your pack will only be from select of cards from the secret pack, often based around 1-2 archetypes. Want to play blue eyes? Craft a blues eyes or related SR/UR, get its secret pack and do some pulling, and even from 1-2 10 packs you will likely walk away with a lot of the core deck. There's still staples that are "mysteriously" not in any secret packs for the sake of getting you to spend your dust and a lot of extra decks will be made up multiple one offs of a UR from another pack but it's w/e. Since starting the game I have completed 4 standard playable decks with no cheap substitutes while spending less than $10 on the game, which doesn't sound amazing but when I opened MTGA for he first time in a while, a game I have put significant more time into than MD, and i got very frustrated thinking about how long it was going to take me to make an Arcanist historic deck without spending money. However, secret pack is the kind of system that mostly works with out YGO decks are made and wouldn't really fit into a lot of other games so it's w/e. Also you still can dust cards for solid rates (those super shiny cards equal a free UR of my choice bro) unlike MTGA fuck you WOTC no one is ever goign to use silent submersible let me turn it into wildcards i beg you i will play standard again if you let me do this please.

Other minor cool things: This game is on every fucking platform with cross accounts, and works really well on a controller. I was computer-less for a few days and played rounds on PS5 and it worked great, and I really enjoyed playing it on controller. Duel Live is a great system and I think games should have it because watching two randoms fight is some really swell fun. Sometimes ill just eat dinner at my desk and let duel live play and see some insane shit happen because YGO is a freakshow of a game. Also replays and spectating tools is something I feel like should be the norm by now but they aren't so I appreciate this game having it.

Good presentation, one of the easier games to collect decks, and feels like an actual modern game.

Lets talk problems.
The biggest for me is lack of format options, most importantly a lack of Bo3 option (there isn't even a way to make a sidedeck for your decks). The game's only way of playing is ranked ladder, which is BO1, and walking into random lobbies, which doesn't have rule set ups if you want to play particular formats/ect.
A lack of a real unranked queue is insane, if you feel like playing a less good deck for fun you're walking into people who are trying to ladder and you're gonna get clobbered with no hope, and it'll just tank your rank. It also means that laddering is exclusively through Bo1, which i think is just a terrible format to ladder through, which is not a YGO exclusive issue I think it's bad in every TCG. It's why a lot of decks in ladder are decks that are strong in BO1 but weaker post sideboard, why there was an issue for a while where people used bots to climb with DD Dynamite, which instantly loses to any sideboarding but you can't so you just randomly lose rank at times, it's why people in MD are built their decks with only 13 extra deck cards to beat DD dynamite bots, or why decks are loaded with sideboard or going second cards in their decks because risking a brick in some matchups is worth having a card that demolishes in other matchups. Bo1 obviously has its place, but Bo1 is killer for motivation in laddering and leads to dumbass deck decisions out of necessity.

So we're already throttled with basically one format, but the second most curious thing about this game is its card choice. YGO is already a bit of a land mine here because there's technically two games, the TCG and the OCG, which have some individual card differences and more importantly different ban lists. Master Duel goes brave new ground by being... neither TCG or OCG? It has its own banlist (which recently had its own banlist addition which will be discussed later). Even most confusingly the game is not up to date with the actual game card list. It's roughly 6 months behind on pack releases, as well as some particular cards that are in rerelease purgatory (s/o to air neos), and since the game came out there's only been one update to add more missing cards.

It sets a bad precedent for the game, where it feels like the game is always going to be 6 months behind the physical game. It makes new card additions to MD less exciting because we know whats going to be good. we know when they get around to adding DPE/adventures the meta is going to shift to those decks, because it's already happened in the physical game.
It hurts the game as an esport attempt, because due to the game being behind on card releases and its own cardlist/banlist it is simply not a digital replacement to either the TCG or the OCG. if you want to practice for TCG/OCG tournaments digitally you're playing one of the sims because those are actually the tournament format. They cant swap to MD at times like WOTC have done with MTGA because it's not the same game, specifically MD tournaments will basically be playing the format from 6 months back, which btw the client also still doesn't have a system for Bo3 so either they're Bo1 tournaments or people just have to submit on paper what their sideboard is and that's lol. And obviously you can't swap full time to MD because it's not like you can just drop the card game that's so much money and will lead to very, very angry people throwing molotovs through your windows.

Master Duel feels like a whole client to play the 6 month old format in Bo1 only, and if you described the game like that you'd have a lot less people playing it.
This also coincides with the recently released new master duel banlist, an incredibly confusing and ominous for the future list that does such impact thins like bring benten to 1 but keeps Eva untouched, conquistador to 1 but all of eldlich's flood gates untouched, casually hitting a card that's core to a FUTURE deck with semi limiting fusion destiny preemeptive response to DPE (which btw still doesn't actually nerf how good the deck is cuz verde lol) and casually dropping one copy of multiple random cards that happen to be in popular decks, and changes absolutely nothing about what decks will be good or what is the most common decks you'll see laddering. infact the biggest change in that banlist is that DD dynamite bots are probably actually dead so that's pretty neat but also they needed to nerf a bad deck in response to rapid bot use instead of actually looking at the bot part of it. Doesn't really spin a lot of confidence.

Master duel is a very pretty, a very modern online TCG client, that acts as a great introduction to a beloved and long lasting card game for people completely new or haven't touched it since the school yard, and will absolutely die if Konami doesn't treat it seriously. The game cannot continue to exist as some bizzaro bo1 old format game. Even the people who get into YGO through it are gonna start jumping off to go play the sims for either the current format or to play different formats, or actually go play the TCG/OCG (which i guess is a best case scenario for konami but i prefer to not think about the concept of konami producing this whole game just to get people into YGO and then abandon it so the new people jonesing for YGO can go buy cards).

Oh yeah, i guess I should actually talk about the game huh? yeah YGO's fun. it's a grimey, complicated and mean as fuck game that wants you to go balls to the walls and some people will hate that and some people will love it. You ever watch high level gameplay of some fighting game like marvel 3 or w/e anime game and you watch someone get stuck in a 30+ second block string into getting hit by a 2L and then they're in another 30+ combo and just fucking die, and when you talk to the players they're like "yeah that was awesome i love this game"? it's like that but for card games. Your experience will vary, but i get a little hard OTKing with rank 10s so it's pretty dope.