Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel – Tips Before Getting Started (Things You Should to Know)

Easy tips that I wish I knew when getting started, including how to get free packs and batch recycle cards.

Tips for Beginners

All credit goes to Solember!

Quick Tips

Some tips for Master Duel

1. You can batch recycle cards in the deck builder by clicking the bars in the top right corner of the screen. This will leave you with 3 copies of every card.
2. Special packs pull from the greater pool of 10k cards with 4 cards guaranteed to be from the special pool that you can check before buying.
3. Getting the season pass is a sensible first purchase, because you will hit a huge reduction in gems early in the game (and might have missed your chance).
4. There is a gem cap of 10k gems, and anything acquired after that goes to your mailbox for 30 days. Think of story duels like a bank you can withdraw from as needed if you fear you might cross this threshold.
5. In story duels, challenges have separate prizes. One is from using the story deck and the other is from using a custom deck. You can check this on the track by clicking on the challenge and then clicking on “Loaner Deck”. This is a good way to get missed Attribute Orbs for clearing gates.
6. Know what you want before you start buying packs. Once you see a specialty pack you are interested in, focus all your attention on that pack, because it’s on a timer. Once you have most/all of the cards you wanted, batch recycle to get a lot of crafting materials from your surplus to fill in the blanks.
7. Crafting an SR or UR card in the deck constructor will unlock that cards Secret Pack as well as giving you 1 free pack.

What I wish I did

What I wish I did first was power through the Story mode with the loan decks. After finishing that (or at least making some quick progress), I would have figured out which cards I was going to need for competitive play, If you like to play casually or with a personal favorite, I would pick one casual deck and one “breadwinner” deck (so that you can progress in the ranks or play for fun whenever you want). After doing this, I would have gone back and finished the side duels in Story Mode.

Something I didn’t know at first was how the Secret Packs worked. I knew you can unlock them by doing Solo mode in some specific cases or by opening generic packs. What I didn’t know was that you can also get them by crafting a SR or UR card that comes in them AND you would get a pack for free by doing this.

For example… I wanted to play with Metaphys. To find which pack the archetype came in, I went to the deck creation card search and looked them up. There is a “How to Obtain” feature on every card. Using this, I found that the pack is called “Interdimensional Interlopers”.

So I started buying a lot of Dark World packs hoping to unlock it by chance (4 cards are random in Secret Packs, and 4 are from the card pool).

That was a huge mistake. What I should have done was craft a Metaphys Ragnarok. It is a SR card from the pack, and crafting one would have unlocked the secret pack in the shop. I spent at least 8,000 gems on Darkworlds (and I now have a Darkworld Deck because of it, coincidentally).