So how do you play Yu-Gi-Oh part 2

 

So what is the significance of spell speeds 1, 2, and 3 maybe a 4th???

Spell speed 1

These effects can be categorized as the slowest of the three spell speeds out there,  effects that start their sentences with "Once per turn" typically are spell speed one. In which case these effects can't typically chain to other effects but if multiple effects activate around the same time then spell speed one effects can chain to each other.

Spell speed 2

These effects are more commonly seen as effects that can be activate from either players turn. These cards can come in the form of a specific type of spell, all trap cards, and monster effects that state that they are "(quick effects.)"

Spell speed 3

These are the fastest of the spell speeds, there is only one type of card that can utilize these effects and those are counter traps which I will showcase down below for the examples of cards. Counter traps can only be chained by other counter traps which is why it makes these cards much more powerful.

Spell speed 1 spell 

Spell speed one monster

Spell speed 2 spell

Real quick this card above is known as a quick play spell you can tell the difference by the little symbol next to the words "spell card."

Spell speed 2 monster

You can tell this card is a quick effect because the effect has quick effect stated in parenthesis.

And once again let me remind you that all normal trap cards are spell speed 2.

Now for spell speed 3 cards which are generally all counter trap cards.

You can tell this from a normal trap by looking at the symbol next to the words "trap card."

But wait is there a spell speed 4???

Well yes and no, while officially there is no such card that Konami has appointed the title of spell speed 4 the community has given this title to cards that cannot be chained to because the card itself forbids it.

An example of a spell speed 4 is:

This card states in the end of the effect that neither player can chain or activate cards and effects in response to its effect. Leaving the opponent to just sit and take all the consequences.

 

So how do you play Yu-Gi-Oh!? part 1

 So how does one... feel the flow?

Well I'm glad you asked because feeling the flow requires a lot  of concentration and commitment, you don't wanna accidentally lose a duel and lose your soul for the great Leviathan now do you? I'm just joking, but these next few blog posts will be dedicated to helping new players understand the mechanics of the game and I don't mean the ones you see in the tutorials of Master Duel, I mean the ones that are conspicuous that you wouldn't normally think of in the game.

First up lets discuss the phases and how each player goes through them.

Draw Phase

This one is sort of self explanatory phase, the turn player is to draw a card and proceed to the standby phase. HOWEVER cards and effects that either spell speed 2 or higher can be activated after the turn player has drawn their card.(I will explain what the spell speeds are in a bit.) After cards and effects resolve then the turn player can proceed to the standby phase.

Standby Phase

This is the phase that comes right before the main phase which is where some card effects happen. It has no other function other than some card effects activate during the standby phases. Again however you could activate spell speed 2 or greater effects here, though generally players wait to use such cards unless it gives them some sort of advantage for the turn.  

Main Phase

The Main phase is where the turn player is able to start making plays with their cards. This is where you can activate your spell speed one effects or greater. Combos can be started here but do be wary that the opponent can activate cards that make it hard for you to be able to have a decent turn. 

Battle Phase

Here is where you can declare attacks on either the opponents monsters or directly to the opponent, you and your opponent can activate spell speed 2 or greater card effects during this time as well.

Main Phase 2

This is where you set up for the opponents turn if perhaps by chance you were not able to win the game by then. You can set traps and do some last minute searches basically set up your defenses for the upcoming turn.

End Phase

Here you merely are declaring that your turn is going to end, some effects happen here during the end phase as well. Again spell speed 2 effects or greater can activate here from either player. Once this phase ends it is now the opponents turn and the cycle repeats.

I will leave this photo to give a better idea of the the phases look.

Link Monsters: I hate these with a Passion.

 Of all the cards Konami could have made Links are possibly my least favorite of all the types. Since it's initial release Links were looked upon with having the potential of slowing down the game as in its time YGO had become such a special fast paced game and it didn't look like it was going to slow down anytime soon. So Links were created to slow down the summons of pendulums, synchro's, fusions, and xyz's, at least initially. There was just one problem during the beginning of the era of Link monsters every YGO player that wanted to play YGO using their old decks were forced to add links to their extra deck and become super creative to use their old decks or completely forget the old decks and only focus on Link based decks.

So what does the Link monster look like? Look below.

This is what a link monster looks like and right off the bat it has a different design than what we have seen previously on other extra deck monsters. These have arrows around the card, there are the black ones that symbolize empty arrows then the lighter colored ones which are the link markers. Those I'll explain in a bit for now lets make us a link summon.

Lets try and summon Decode talker, seems easy enough it says that it needs 2+ monsters so I should only need to effect monsters to summon it right?...Right??? WRONG!! See Konami made these summoning mechanics pretty obscure and bleak for it's time that putting things like 2+ monsters was like saying a tuner and a non tuner monster is used for synchro summons.

Well give me a moment to be able to explain this without being really vague. Yes and no you can use 2 monsters to summon this monster. If we take a close look at the bottom right corner we see the it is a Link 3 monsters which means that at most you require 3 effect monsters to be able to summon this card for an example look below.

You have three effect monsters and send them to the graveyard as link material and summon out the link monsters and that's the first way to summon a link monsters

Now we have the second way with which to link summon using only 2 monsters. We can use smaller link monsters in order to summon the bigger ones. With this I mean if we were to use a link 2 monster and one effect monster then we can summon out the link 3 think of it as just 2+1=3 and bam there's a link 3 for the example look below

                                                                     

To the left have the link 2 Proxy Dragon and to the right we have the effect monster cyberse wizard, if send them to the graveyard then we can summon out decode talker.

Links have had a significant impact on the game since their release this is currently what their game state looks like however:

Link monsters can be used to open up the spaces to other link monsters or pendulum monsters that need to be summoned from the extra deck. Which is honestly so good because the game used to look like this:

So basically Link monsters used to dictate where xyz, fusion, synchros, as well as pendulum monsters could be summoned. This was just such a distasteful way of playing the game it was kind of boring to be honest. 

That is link summons in a nutshell I hope for my case you don't ask questions about this but I will answer all questions about this thanks for reading and I will be back in the next blog.

Pendulum! Pendulum! Pendulum!

 What is a Pendulum card?

Let the madness begin.

      This is honestly one of those few moments in YGO that I don't inherently like per say and that is because whenever pendulums are brought up in the discussion of YGO I remember a dark era of YGO that was overruled or overshadowed by a single new summoning mechanics. Pendulum cards are probably the single most problematic cards out there in YGO even Konami themselves don't have a solid idea of what to do with these cards. Should they gain more support or should they stop the production of these cards and leave them with what they have. I personally feel that they should keep getting support since recently their play ability has gone down in numbers recently since the majority of the decks rely too much on a single link.

So what is a Pendulum card? For an example look below.

As you can see the card is pretty much a half monster and half spell and instead of just having one effect text box it has a pendulum effect as well. The effect that is in smaller font is the pendulum effect and on both sides of the text box there is a number. That number represents the pendulum scale from one end of the spectrum. If you think this is weird then wait till I show you what a pendulum summon is, this one is a doozy. With that said there is such a thing as a pendulum summon... and it's really weird.

In order to better understand how to pendulum summon I need you to look at the field below real quick.

Here we see that there are five monster zones and five spell and trap zones. On the ends of the spell and trap zone there is a blue and red diamond shape this is where you place you pendulum scales. Scales are the number from which you are limiting yourself to be able to pendulum summon. So lets say I want to pendulum summon. I'd have to place two cards in the pendulum zone to be able to do that so I am going to place these two cards in the pendulum zones.

                                                                       

The scales set are 1 and 8 based off what the scales say on the card. Now we are allowed to pendulum summon any monsters that have levels between 1 and 8 so any monsters who are levels 2-7. This is a very broken method of summoning, you can summon any number of numbers whose levels fall 2 through 7. There is a limit however to this, in the past there was the rule that you could summon any number of pendulum monsters from your hand or face up in your extra deck. The new rule states that now you can now only pendulum as many from your hand but the extra deck summons is limited to the extra monster zone or any open link zones which is something that will be covered in the next blog.

BUT SYNCHROACE, you said that there face up pendulums in the extra deck, what is that all about? Well I'm glad you noticed because there is one more special trait about these here pendulum cards.

Should pendulum cards be destroyed either by battle or card effect, instead of being sent to the graveyard they are sent to the extra deck on the very top face up. That's pretty cool considering it can dodge being banished from the graveyard. However there are exceptions to this rule, like being detached from an xyz monster, then pendulum cards are sent to the graveyard, or if a card specifically says to send cards to the graveyard then pendulums once again are sent to the graveyard.

There are variants to these pendulum cards because Konami decided to throw away al logic when creating these cards

There are Pendulum synchros

There are also pendulum fusions

And what a surprise there are also pendulum xyz

Each one these monsters first must be summoned through the regular summoning method before than can be re-summoned using the pendulum summon method. Needless to say these cards are each very powerful in their own way.

This pretty much sums up pendulum summoning in a nutshell it's not very easy per say but it's a good tech card. Sometimes we just need cards to balance the more obscure cards out there and that is exactly what Link monsters were made for.

What is an XYZ summon?

  A New Beginning: What's an XYZ summon?

As we all know Yu-Gi-Oh has had the most change in the last 10 years than it has in it's first 10 years. That said since I've already posted what the meta and competitive looks like in modern yugioh, I thought that it is time to start over and give you all a pop quiz on all the new summoning mechanics. Since 2012 there have only been 3 new summoning mechanics and I I want to start from least difficult to understand to most difficult to understand. Synchro's will not be on the list since technically they came out in 2008 and do not fit in the 10 year window since their debut.

Up first we have the XYZ monsters

These cards are most well recognized by the black color in their background the way you summon one of these xyz monsters is by stacking monsters with right levels(you can tell by the amount of black stars on the xyz card itself.) For the card above you require two level four monsters in order to summon it, when you have the required cards on your field you are allowed to perform an xyz summon in which you stack the monsters you are using to summon the xyz below the xyz on the field. For a visual on what that looks like please look below.

As you the three kuri volts have been stacked below the xyz monster, this is a little hard to understand but the kurivolts in this example would be considered to no longer be on the field but are now considered as xyz material. XYZ material are used as the xyz's monster main source of power, they are essentially required in order to use the effects of most xyz monsters(there are exceptions out there.) In order to use these effects you must detach a xyz material of your choice and send them to the graveyard.

Utopias effect as seen above would be to stop a monsters incoming attack from happening and in order to do that the player would need to detach a xyz material and send it to the graveyard. This is basically the jist of  what a xyz summoning is there are many more xyz monsters out there nowadays that it's hard to keep count of which are the most powerful. If there is anything else you'd like to know about xyz monsters go ahead and leave a comment and I'll cover it at soon as I can. Next up we will be covering link monsters in the next summoning mechanic blog.

Top most competitive decks in current Master Duel format 02/12/2022

What are the Top Competitive Decks In Yugioh? 

As we all know YGO is a very competitive game. Known for being very expensive as a pay to win game, YGO master duel however for the most is not built like this. When players initially play the game they are given a hefty amount of gems to build their decks. That being said aside from the meta decks that are out there, there are also the competitive aspect to the game. What is a way to tell what decks are the most competitive in todays Master Duel format. Well I'm here to give you guys a peak at three of the most competitive decks on Master Duel.

Up first we have a major fan favorite, Dinosaur OTK.

This deck is just a embodiment of destruction, one false move on the opponents behalf and this archetype based deck will most definitely punish with an absolute defeat. The deck while very powerful on its own is much more powerful if you integrate the Wyrm cards from the True King cards. These True King cards help deck be more consistent but also they help this deck get the bread and butter of all cards. Using two level nine True King monsters this dinosaur deck is able to summon the second Boss monster of the deck that of which being The True King of all Calamities. This deck has placed top places in many past tournaments and will continue to do so until it's heavy hitters are banned if there was a competitive out there to play it would be this one.

Next on The List is Phantom Knights

This deck is capable of setting up multiple negates in a turn using its back row, what's even more impressive about this deck is the amount of synergy it has with other dark attribute based decks. If you want a deck that is more defensive than offensive based deck then you could combine this deck with the Burning Abyss archetype. If you are feeling like being aggressive and always going for the attack then you combine this deck with the Orcust archetype. Simply put this deck has many variants and many strategies to implement into your gaming style. The deck has seen a more usage in Master Duel due to the deck being at full power virtually untouched by the ban list. This deck is a combo based deck so if you like making your turns as puzzle inducing as possible then I would definitely recommend this deck for you.

And Now for the Last deck on top most Competitive Decks in current game.

Virtual World

Now this deck is kind of similar to the dinosaur deck in which they are both able to summon The True King of all calamities. This decks entire strategy is based solely on summoning The True King of all Calamities which is why this deck is very much looked at when it comes to a competitive deck. Essentially this deck is made to stop the opponent from playing in their first turn making for a easy win for Virtual Worlds. 

These decks have been proven to take on opponents that specialize in summoning multiple monsters to the field and rely on their monsters effects in order to win the duel. While these are not as popular as the meta decks they are more than powerful enough to take on all meta decks. 

Current Yugioh Meta 02/08/2022

 So What is the Meta Right Now?

I know for a fact that there will be a lot of people wanting to know right away about what current meta in YGO is looking like. For those of you that are returning players don't be discouraged if the archetypes are those of which you haven't heard about yet. These following decks are very powerful each in their own respects virtually untouched by the ban list in Master Duel. These decks are also not in any particular order they are very much capable of turning the tide of advantage in other peoples favor.

The first deck featured is that of Eldlich control.

This is a trap heavy deck with most decks utilizing floodgates or cards that limit the opponents ability to do as they please on their turn. If you like stopping your opponent from playing before their turn then this deck is your best bet, also requires no knowledge of how combos work mainly because you are just drawing into a lot of trap cards in which you just set the ones you need and pass the turn. You can add rank 8 xyz cards into the extra deck for insurance that you have a powerful enough monster to win the game but Eldlich the Golden Lord is honestly a powerful enough monster to get the job done on his own. The best way to counter a deck like this would be to play spell and trap removal like twin twister or spell and trap floodgates like Denko Sekka. Even with these cards in mind there are strategies that Eldlich players have incorporated into protecting their spells and traps so watch out for that.

The second deck we are mentioning today is Zoodiac

The reason why such an old archetype is doing so good is because of one power house of a card that has great synergy with it. Devine Arsenal AA-ZEUS - Sky Thunder, this xyz monster was made to just destroy anything opposing it, not only is its effect to banish everything the opponent has on the field, it is neither once per turn nor once per chain effect effect and is a quick effect. zoodiac can summon that boss monster with the most ease. 

The Third deck on the list is Sky Striker

This deck is built to stop the opponent from doing what they please using spells mostly and several link one monsters. Don't be deceived by their low attack strength these low attack monster have been known for taking down giants like dinosaurs and combo based decks. If there was any deck to use anti magic fragrance against it would be this one. Since the deck utilizes mostly spells and a few traps the best cards to counter this deck are anti spell cards and spell/trap removal. Regardless however if you decide to pick up this deck then if you play your cards right then there is nothing stopping you from winning that duel.

The fourth deck on the list is known as Drytron

Now Drytron is a combo based deck that sets up multiple negates and disruptions. This deck goes well with the Herald archetype both working in sync and being able to summon multiple monsters and search for all the essential pieces. This deck is best against multiple decks if it sets up boards first, like all the other meta decks it does play a lot of hand traps which slows down the opponent. Weaknesses of this deck would include cards like floodgates and specifically the hand trap Nebiru. Just make sure you know when the right time to use these cards are, if you pick the wrong time to activate hand traps then its less effective against this deck.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, For New and Returning Players: The Beginning of a Long Journey.

The Beginning of a Long Journey

Welcome one, Welcome all to the start or the restart of your Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel journey.

    If you are here that means that your have recently discovered that Konami has made a remote dueling game and you either want to start playing the game or want to start playing the game again.

Regardless of your reason for playing the game I am here to give you guys all of my knowledge regarding the game so that you are ready to either start your journey or begin your return to the game.

This is not just for the readers enjoyment I too will be challenging my knowledge on this game and I can not wait to show you guys what I have to say about this here children's card game.

QUICK!! 10 Facts about me so that I am not a complete stranger to you all.

Fact number one: My journey for YGO started back when I was in 6th grade so roughly about 12 years ago.

Fact number two: I am indeed a college student pursuing a future in content creating.

Fact number three: My favorite YGO anime series is 5D's, those synchro summons just looked so beautiful on screen.

Fact number four: Using fact threes logic my favorite YGO archetype is Synchrons

Fact number five: The most meta deck I played at my locals ever was Salamangreat and boy were those hard to use.

Fact number six: My favorite food is pizza with a close second going to ramen. 

Fact number seven: I like singing songs at parties like karaoke and such.

Fact number eight: My all time favorite anime is Bleach, yeah people often ask me why isn't it Naruto and to them I say Bleach resonated with me even more.

Fact number nine: I have many other interests as well I am sort a car guy, I like to collect cool transformer toys, and I have a small pop figure collection. 

and Fact number ten: I do a pretty good job of voice impressions my favorite is Mr. Popo from the abridged dbz series.

Now that you know a little bit about me I want to know about you, what made want to either start playing the game or come back to the game? What are you favorite attributes in deck that you look for? Do you have a favorite archetype? What do want to know most about YGO? 

Well regardless of what your answers are I am sure we are going to be going through a nice journey together.

Topics that you can see in the future regarding this Blog.

The Meta

- this section will have many sub sections as the meta is constantly changing but I will definitely be addressing this topic first for those that want to start playing right away.

New summoning methods

- This one will mainly have four different sub sections as there have only been four different summoning mechanics since 2008.

The new archetypes

- This section will specifically will be really long because there have been so many archetypes released in the last ten years and for that reason I will not focus on this section as much as the others in the coming weeks.

Different Strategies and Combos

- This section will be focusing on what deck strategies are better for players and what are the more broken cards in the game, this will also address tournament decks vs budget decks so people who don't want to spend as much money can also play.

Basic modern YGO

- This topic will also not be as touched upon as there many other reasons but if you feel that there is something about the game that you do not understand like basic summoning mechanics or how card effects work I am here for you and it will be covered in its own blog.

The Ban list

- This topic is important because it determines how the meta is defined. The reason why it deserves it's own section is because the ban list could cover multiple different decks and there might to be some changes made to multiple deck. This is actually one my favorite things about YGO, I once made a working Quasar deck during link format it was hard but I succeeded indefinitely.

There you go, if you think I am missing anything please let me know I will gladly add it to the list. I'm thankful for anyone who is reading this blog and I hope to keep you engaged in the world of YGO.

Yours Truly 

- Synchro Ace