The New YU-GI-OH! Speed Duel Starter Decks Are Pretty Good
I like to dabble in Speed Duels for Yu-Gi-Oh! every now and then, and I might consider getting more active now. Konami was kind enough to send me a copy of the new Starter Deck: Match of the Millennium and Starter Deck: Twisted Nightmare, and I’m impressed. I’d previously played a little with Starter Decks: Destiny Masters and Duelists of Tomorrow, and those decks were meh. These new decks have a lot more potential in my opinion.
Match of the Millennium offers a 31-card Yami Yugi deck (why don’t we just call him Atem?) and a 31-card Pegasus deck. The Yugi deck focuses a little on Black Luster Soldier and Gaia the Fierce Knight, something that I really like since I’m a sucker for Warrior-type monsters, and BLS is my favorite card. The deck isn’t great (what do you expect from a Starter Deck), but it’s a great platform. If you got three of these decks, you could probably make an ok Speed Duels deck. The Pegasus deck on the other hand is probably my favorite of the four I got. It has great support for Thousand-Eyes Restrict and good support for Toons. I was worried that the Toons were going to be more basic ones like what we got in Destiny Masters, but I was pleasantly surprised to see better ones like Toon Table of Contents and Toon Barrel Dragon. If you got two to three copies of this deck, you could make a pretty decent deck from it.
Twisted Nightmares offers a 30-card Marik deck which is all about pretty useless Fiend-type monsters with the occasional gem like Lava Golem thrown in for good measure. Honestly, I know it’s more or less the theme of Marik’s deck in the anime, but can we just admit it isn’t a great deck in real life? Most of the cards themselves are meh. The star of this two-pack is the 30-card Bakura deck which is all about Fiends and getting Dark Necrofear out. I was impressed much more with this deck. It seems more cohesive and a lot less like they just threw a bunch of Fiends together and said, “It’s a deck!”
Each of the decks comes with four Skill Cards (two for each character) that are actually pretty good. I felt like earlier Skill Cards were pretty generic and meh, but these are a bit more focused and tend to be better. Each of the four decks also comes with an Ultra Rare variant card like D.D. Crow or Advanced Ritual Art. These are typically designed to help give that specific deck a boost in some way.
If you’re interested in trying Speed Duels, pick up one of these new Starter Decks and since each pack comes with two decks, you can immediately start playing with a friend. Which of these new decks is your favorite?