Yes, my beloved childhood card game which has changed so much over the years has a massive problem. The problem is that it’s just not fun.

I’ll admit I only really play Master Duel to play with other players and once you hit gold rank there’s three decks in play: Blackwings which swarm powerful monsters, weaken everything and cancel effects; Blue Eyes which has effect resistant mega powerful monsters; and there’s Tearlaments which stop the opponent being able to do anything. You never see anything different which is boring.

So I lose a bit, go down a few ranks. With my Salamangreat deck I could start winning again but playing the same strategy over and over is boring so I change up to a deck I don’t know so well, suddenly I can’t win. I’m forced to use a slightly overpowered edited structure deck or I don’t have a chance, great! The worst thing is that using Salamangreats gets me to a point where some players just surrender after seeing Link monsters which pushes me into the higher rank (refer to the above paragraph to see why this is a problem).

I’ve had good matches where it’s play after play with my opponents being below four thousand life points at the same time as I am. A trap, a monster reversal, it’s thrilling and intense like the duels in the anime. These duels also often have less common strategies and with these duels I’m not always using Salamangreats and the game is fun.

The other option with Master Duel is Casual play which brings in creativeness and new strategies but carries no rewards. You can’t improve with no reward so are stuck with the same strategies all the time.

There’s some unfairness built into quite a few cards and most of that is down to making sure the opponent can’t do anything. I’m not mean spirited enough to enjoy this style against others and find myself bored when it’s used against me.

I started looking into Tearlaments which showed me that the method of creating cards is ruining the Yugioh card game. Cards are released to play a powerful strategy, those cards are near unbeatable, some cards get limited or banned, new cards are made to be more powerful than the extremely powerful cards. Effectively, because of there being no management of power when creating cards most cards not supported by the powerful new ones aren’t viable for play. Yugioh has something like ten thousand or more cards but only two or three hundred have any reason to exist.

I enjoy losing when I’m learning something or when the opponent has a fun deck like Exodia. I saw a Left Arm on Master Duel and played defensively to see if the whole thing came out which was fun to see.

I don’t find playing the same deck against one of three decks fun and I don’t like basically being disabled in a match. I can only blame Master Duel for the bad rank system that rubbish Chinese bots and surrendering players manage to corrupt, the right players in the right rank play in a way that can be fun.

It’s so rare to see the fun players though and although Master Duel needs fixing, the whole of Yugioh is a bit broken because of card creation and the internet having easy guides to be overpowered doesn’t help.

Obviously I’m an idiot and I want to love the game but it becomes dull very easily.