Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links – Advanced Delay-Reading Guide

An Advanced Guide for reading your opponents set cards.

Other Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links Guides:

Advanced Delay-Reading Guide

Please note: all credit goes to Kaito!

To understand this guide you need to know how normal Delay-Reading works.

I am not going in-depth on that but the basics are that you can exclude what cards a set card of your opponent might be by looking for the delays that the game server creates when he asks your opponent if he want to activate a card. Your opponent can try to play around that by smartly turning his toggle to OFF when he does not want to activate a card to avoid noticeable delays.

With the method which I will call Advanced Delay-Reading here your opponent can no longer deceive you with his toggle and you will also be able gather more intel on set cards compared to the standard method.

To do this you need to know two pieces of information:

First of all there is a visual indicator for delays in the game. If you look to the top right corner of your screen you will see an hourglass that is spinning at all times. This hourglass has two different modes it is ether glowing (ON) or it is not glowing (OFF).

Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links - Advanced Delay-Reading Guide

When the hourglass is OFF that means it is your turn to do an action and when it is ON that means that your opponent can activate a card. Now this is convenient in a sense that it does not get influenced by delays that are coming from your network connection. But the important part is that you will be able to see delays which are very short (in ms range).

Are there delays that are this short? Yes which will bring us to the second information:

Your toggle is ALWAYS set to ON.

The way toggles work in Duel Links is that they are entirely client-side. The server which is where the game is played will ask your client at every possible moment if you want to activate a card. If you have your toggle set to AUTO or OFF your client will immediately respond to the server with an “I don’t want to activate a card”. This process happens so fast that you will not notice it as a delay. However you will be able to spot the delay if you pay close attention to the hourglass mentioned before which will still “flash” meaning it turns ON and OFF very quickly.

With this you can gather more information about set cards than by looking for delays.

Let me give you some examples where this can give you an advantage with the iconic cards Enemy Controller, Mirror Wall and Sphere Kuribo.

1. Toggle OFF:

Your opponent has a Sphere Kuribo in his hand and no cards set. It is your battle phase and you attack him directly. Since he doesn’t want you to know that he has a Kuribo he will turn his toggle to OFF. You will not notice any delays when you attack but you will see the hourglass flash for a split second at the start of the attack telling you that he has Kuribo in Hand.

2. Your Standby Phase:

Let’s say your opponent normal summons a monster sets one card and ends his turn.
You know your opponent plays mirror wall (mw) and enemy controller (econ) as backrow in his deck (for this technique to be effective you need to have a good understanding of the meta).
On your turn you normal summon a monster in the main phase there is a delay now.
Since both mw and econ would cause a delay at this point you do not know which one it is.
However if you paid attention to the hourglass than you know which card your opponent has set.
Econ is not activate-able here during the draw and standby phase as it’s activation condition is that your opponent controls a face up monster. So in case of econ the hourglass would be OFF during standby and draw phase while the hourglass would flash twice if it was mirror wall (which can be activated all the time).

3. Special Case Your Opponents Standby Phase:

There is a special case where you can get a read on your opponents hand which I want to highlight here. The condition is that you have a set card that can be activated during your opponents standby phase (otherwise the hourglass will constantly be to ON since it is your opponents turn).
Now lets say for example you play a monster face up, set Mirror Wall and end your turn.
If your opponent has an enemy controller in his opening hand the hourglass will flash since econ can be activated during the standby phase. If not the hourglass will be OFF during standby phase because only you can activate any cards. This tells you your opponent has a quick play spell in hand.

I hope these examples gave you some idea on how to apply this technique.

Volodymyr Azimoff
About Volodymyr Azimoff 15051 Articles
I love games and I live games. Video games are my passion, my hobby and my job. My experience with games started back in 1994 with the Metal Mutant game on ZX Spectrum computer. And since then, I’ve been playing on anything from consoles, to mobile devices.

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