Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel's surprise launch in January of this year saw massive success with the game immediately seeing significant success on both Steam and consoles. The long-awaited adaptation of Konami's long-running card game surpassed 4 million downloads in less than two weeks following its release and has since seen new content consistently added across Solo stories, new cards, and monthly events with unique restrictions. However, for many Yu-Gi-Oh! players, the game's banlist has been a point of contention with Konami's most recent update looking to address some of those concerns.
Throughout the first three months of Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel's lifespan, the game has slowly added new content and ways for players to experience the massively popular game. Earlier this month, Konami added the first wave of new cards into the game introducing fan-favorite archetypes from recent Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game booster sets like the "Despia" and "Suship" cards, and Master Duel recently finished its Synchro Monster-focused "Synchro Festival" event. Now, Konami has officially announced the first-ever update to Master Duel's banlist with a plethora of cards seeing new restrictions.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel's first banlist looks to take a conservative approach to addressing many of the game's strongest decks, only limiting a small number of cards to one copy and semi-limiting several others to two. No cards were added to the game's Forbidden list for its first banlist update, however the powerful Drytron and Eldlich strategies took hits through the limiting of "Cyber Angel Benten" and "Conquistador of the Golden Land." Both decks have been considered among the strongest for Master Duel's Ranked mode due to the powerful boards they can establish in a best-of-1 format.
While Eldlich and Drytron were the only strategies to see key cards limited, plenty of Master Duel's most relevant decks lost copies of other powerful pieces for their game plan. Meta-defining decks like Tri-Brigade Lyrilusc also saw multiple cards taken away with both "Tri-Brigade Fraktall" and "Lyrilusc - Cobalt Sparrow" cut to two copies while other decks like Phantom Knights and Virtual World saw more minor hits. Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon was the only card to be fully removed from the banlist.
While Master Duel's banlist will look to shake up the competitive format, many players are already looking towards the future of the game and what cards are yet to come to Master Duel. The current release cycle places the game's card pool ten months behind the physical card game with many competitive staples like "Destiny HERO - Destroyer Phoenix Enforcer" and the Adventurer cards still on the horizon. While Konami's first banlist update takes a nuanced approach at addressing the game's meta, the upcoming new cards will look to shake up the Ranked queue even more.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and mobile devices.
