One of the biggest updates yet for Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel has just landed, including some bug fixes and some amazing additions to flesh out the game. It is great to see Konami do more than fix bugs and slowly roll out new card sets; for anyone not in the know, the current card pool for Master Duel is around one to two years behind the present TCG/OCG card pool.
The last big addition we got to Master Duel in the previous update was the Casual Match game mode that opened up online matchmaking that wasn’t part of the ranked ladder, something that many wanted and weirdly missing from the original release. As we have seen, however, despite Master Duel already being a high-quality game Konami is not sitting on their laurels; since its release at the start of the year in January, Master Duel has received consistent quality-of-life upgrades and new game modes in addition to the normal bug fixes.
This leads us to the biggest addition to Master Duel in this update, the new Team Battle Game Mode. Team Battle is a completely different game mode from the previously available options in Master Duel. In Team Battle you play 3v3 or 5v5 and can even recruit teammates if you don’t have enough people for a team. It is great to see Konami supporting alternate formats for Yu-Gi-Oh in an official game, even if they aren’t doing it for the physical card game. We can only hope Yu-Gi-Oh gets more officially supported formats from Konami like WoC does for Magic: The Gathering, who knows one day we may even get cards designed for use in different formats, so far all we have is Rush Duel, and that’s currently only in Japan.
The other parts of the update aren’t as big as the new game mode but are still relatively important. First, we have the new selection pack available in the store, Battle Trajectory. In terms of cards added, it’s nothing meta-warping and is only of interest to the pendulum fanatics out there or the rare Scareclaw stan. There are also a few new accessories in the shop, but the cool addition is the ability to buy new deck slots. Aside from that, it’s just bug fixes. That’s all for the Master Duel update, definitely time to gather some friends to try out a team battle.
