A Guide to Playing Old School (aka Goat Format) YU-GI-OH!
About a week ago, I shared one of my thoughts about the current state of Yu-Gi-Oh! and how powercreep has become ridiculous in the game. In the comments and other discussions, I noticed people talked about “Goat Format,” and I thought some might be interested in this unofficial version of Yu-Gi-Oh!. I’d heard about the format before, but finally decided to actually look into it. In short, it’s an unofficial format for Yu-Gi-Oh! fans to enjoy the game from its early days. It uses the rules and cards that were legal during the summer of 2005, which allows all cards through The Lost Millennium to be used. If this sounds interesting to you, please keep reading.
First, you need to know what cards are available. The unoffical website for Goat Format has a Google Sheet that fans can access as well as the appropriate banlist for the format. I found that for cursory glances of what packs were legal, YGOProDeck was a little easier for me to see and understand. Now, you need to figure out if you’re going to play virtually or in-person. If you’re playing in-person (hopefully not during this time of social distancing), you simply need to buy cards legal in the format and put them into a deck for this step.
If you’re playing virtually, DuelingBook is the only simulator currently supporting Goat Format, but its deck builder does have a built-in option to only show cards legal in Goat Format. Simply create an account and then enter the Deck Constructor, click “more options,” then under “Custom:” select “Goat Format Cards,” and then hit “Search.” This will show you only legal cards, but it won’t tell you the Goat banlist, so you’ll still need to be conscious of that.
So, we’ve checked the banlist, checked which cards are legal, and made a deck. Now what? Well, for starters, brush up on the rules. If you’ve ever played, you know a lot of the basics, but there are some rules that have changed and Goat Format reverts them to how they were (such as having unlimited sized Main and Extra Decks or the first player drawing). You can find these reverted rules on the site. If you haven’t played the game before, you can learn the basics from Version 5 of the official rulebook.
Now that you’ve brushed up on the rules, you probably want to play with people. Simply find your friends you’ve convinced to also play Goat Format or load up DuelingBook and go for it. If you want to know what the top decks are, you can check out the tier list, and you’ll find that most people play either Goat Control or Thunder Dragon Chaos. My personal experience has shown me that Thunder Dragon Chaos is the most popular. However, many other old decks are viable, although they may not be Tier 1 or Tier 0.
I’ve been playing Goat Format for a bit now on DuelingBook, and it really does take you back. The big bummer for me is that 85% of the time you’ll just face the two top tier decks, and unless you also use one of the established top tier decks, you probably won’t do well. My personal experience is that people don’t play around and experiment with a bunch of different kinds of decks, but rather just stick with the top tier meta decks. What’s your favorite Goat Deck? My personal favorite is my Warrior Deck.