As it stands, Konami is doing a lot of things right with Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel. The presentation is good, the music is exciting, the mechanics are sound and its online multiplayer is mostly stable. The company has even shown restraint when it comes to selling card packs and premium currency, a policy that’ll likely remain surprising for as long as it lasts. Much has been done to foster the game’s growth as well, with the support team responding quickly to major issues and the community given lots of incentives to keep logging in. It really is going well, and more casual modes would make it even better.
Just about all players who participate in Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel have the ability to make just about any deck they want and test it against others online.Even free playerscan make and enjoy several good ones before running out of resources. This is great, but it’s limited by the modes currently available. Outside of special event periods, the only multiplayer modes currently available in Master Duel are Ranked Mode and Duel Room, and both of these have their problems.
In Ranked Mode, the main issue is that it’s ranked. Rewards, experience and status are on the line, so most players are trying their hardest to win, and that means using the strongest deck one can. There’s nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but it does mean that a great many decks can only last so long in ranked mode. After hitting mid to high gold, chances are good that players will need to switch to a more meta-friendly deck in order to continue.
The solution should be to just go to the duel rooms, but there are some issues with that as well. It’s currently difficult to tell what one will be facing in a given room, and there’s no guarantee that anyone will join one’s own custom-made room. It also doesn’t help that there are no rewards to be gained by playing in duel rooms, but perhaps that’s a necessary condition. Just one look at Duel Links’ “Casual Duels” is enough to acknowledge that. Still, something else is needed, and that something is some kind of social ladder.
A mode that offers at least some sense of progression while also removing some of the pressure to win would likely allow a wider variety of decks to flourish in the Master Duel ecosystem. Even something basic as a separate ladder with only experience-based advancement and only small amounts of rewards from daily challenges would be enough. A social mode with proper rewards would be nice, but that would make it attractive to botters and nobody wants to seeeven more of themshow up in the game.
If this sort of generic casual ladder isn’t workable for fear of bots, then perhaps a matchmade playlist system could be implemented. These also would likely be able to offer nothing more than a playlist rank, but the ability to play in different formats should be enough. Konami could start by making spaces dedicated to Fusion, Synchro, XYZ, Pendulum, Link or perhaps even the recent “Limit One” formats, but there’s a lot of potential in the game for more.
Theoretically, formats focusing on certain eras, years, rarities or even archetypes could be made available for players to enjoy. Thusly, it’d actually be worth it to build a wider variety of decks for oneself rather than concentrating mostly on meta archetypes. There’s a risk of diluting the ranked pool of players of course, but it shouldn’t be too much of a problem if most rewards remain tied to it. So long as too much isn’t available at once, playlist-style social modes could quickly make Master Duel a much more entertaining (and profitable) game.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is still a relatively new game, one that Konami seems to be interested in supporting for a good long while. So, it may very well be that all this is already in its development pipeline in some form. Even so, sooner is better than later, and the sooner players start getting more ways to enjoy their weaker decks, the better-off the game will be. Perhaps one day soon, even something like a Malefic deck will have a place in which to shine.
