There are a fair few starter decks in Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel, all of which offer up different strategies and options for a player. With the sheer amount of options, it’s very easy to feel choice paralysis when deciding what deck you want to play with. We’ve rounded up the best starter decks, along with the very worst of the worst that you should avoid, so strap in and get prepared.
Burning Spirits
Burning Spirits is one of the better structure decks on Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel. It consists of the infamous Salamangreat archetype, an archetype that was meta-defining for quite an impressive period of time. You get some pretty incredible Link Monsters such as Salamangreat Heatleo, Salamangreat Sunlight Wolf, and Salamangreat Balelynx, all of which can be used in a strategy that will absolutely ensure your future success in the game.
There are also some trap and spell cards that truly turn the archetype into a force to be reckoned with. You have Salamangreat Circle, Salamangreat Sanctuary, Salamangreat Roar, and the best card in the entire deck, Cynet Mining. Cynet Mining allows you to search ANY level 4 or lower Cyberse monster from your deck and combined with the effect of Salamangreat Heatleo you can basically destroy your opponent’s hopes and dreams with one of the absolute best structure decks available to purchase.
There are a few cards that you won’t play, such as Salamangreat Beat Bison, but most of the cards in this deck will find a place in a deck of yours, even if it isn’t a Salamangreat deck. Indeed, a lot of these cards are multiple-purpose and playable in multiple decks, such as Decode Talker Heatsoul.
Dragonmaid-To-Order
Dragonmaid-To-Order basically has everything you could need to make a semi-competent dragon deck. You have Return Of The Dragon Lords, a card that allows you to resurrect a level 7 or 8 dragon monster AND banishes itself in place of a dragon monster being destroyed.
That card is also not a once-per-turn, meaning you can abuse it to make a board that should be feared. There’s Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon too, a card so powerful that it’s been on and off the ban list multiple times due to the fact it allows you to be special summon any dragon-type monster from your hand or your graveyard.
As far as the actual Dragonmaid portion of the deck goes though, that’s pretty great too. You’re given all of the standard Dragonmaid Fusions and monster cards, and all of the spell/trap cards that you need in order to make the deck actually work.
You even get given the Hieratic Seal of the Heavenly Spheres, a card that can REALLY do some damage to your opponent provided that you play it right (and in order to play it right you really do need to understand what you’re doing with the deck, so practice it as much as you can!)
Rage Of Cipher
Yes, XYZ decks are a dime a dozen. Ever since the introduction of the XYZ mechanic, we’ve seen people try over and over again to break the mechanic (with some extreme successes in the TCG that frankly we’re still reeling from). Galaxy-Eyes might not be the best option for a starter deck, and it’s certainly not the most consistent option, but the number of different strategies you can employ easily make this one of the most fun XYZ decks available currently.
With this structure deck, you get everything that you need to make sure that the deck is consistent, along with a few cards that you can use in different decks as staple cards, and even some that work in currently meta-defining decks and are so malleable that they need to be in your collection.
You get cards such as Honest, a card that quite frankly is great in any light deck. You have Galaxy Cyclone, a great removal spell that stops back row strategies.
And you also have the standard Galaxy-Eyes XYZ cards: Galaxy-Eyes Cipher Dragon, Neo Galaxy-Eyes Cipher Dragon, Galaxy-Eyes Cipher Blade Dragon, and Galaxy-Eyes Cipher X Dragon, all cards that are great on their own but work really well as a strategy in this structure deck, especially with three separate versions of the deck pooled together.
Magician Of Pendulum
So you’ve read up on Pendulum summoning, and you think it sounds pretty cool to summon multiple different monster cards at once.
This structure deck has everything you need to make that happen with some cards included in the deck that was banned once upon a time in the TCG, and even some cards for your extra deck strategy. The spell cards in this deck also have to be seen to be believed, with some incredible methods of searching out various different cards available to a pendulum player.
Wavering Eyes, Duelist Alliance, and Pendulum Call all search your pendulum scales and allow you to protect your cards from destruction so that you can successfully pendulum summon as many monsters as you want before going into a more powerful monster.
Performapal Skullcrobat Joker searches any Performapal monster, Magician Pendulum Monster, or Odd-Eyes monster from your deck to your hand.
Immortal Glory
Next, we come to Immortal Glory, a strategy based on the zombie typing of monsters. You’re given Zombie World, one of the best field spells for strategies that aim to lock your opponent out of different cards, and you have everything that you need to resurrect your monsters from the graveyard in Gozuki and Mezuki. Necromancer Banshee helps you to find your field spell, meaning that you’re never far from it.
Oh, and did we mention that these zombies can synchro-summon? Because these zombies can synchro summon using the level modulation ability of Uni-Zombie, and using that ability also makes it much easier to place Mezuki and other cards that you might want in the graveyard into the graveyard. Combine this with the trap cards that the deck provides and you’ll never be far from victory at any given point and will be able to drag your opponent down to the depths of hell along with you.
Spellbook Of Prophecy
Finally, we come to Spellbook Of Prophecy. It’s not a deck that seems particularly impressive from the outset, but the Spellbook archetype used to be a terrifying meta-threat in the TCG years ago, and this master duel structure deck shows that it could still stand to be a threat to this day.
Spellbook of Judgment might be one of the most cracked cards ever printed, basically reading that you can add as many spellbook spell cards to your hand as you want along with allowing you to special summon the card with a level equal to the number of spell cards that you activated that turn.
There’s also a whole bunch of great searchers such as Spellbook of Secrets and Spellbook Magician of Prophecy. There’s also a whole bunch of really great extra deck monsters that buff up your entire strategy, such as:
- Fortune Lady Every
- Crowley The First Propheseer
- Arcanite Magician
- Empress of Prophecy
The link monster in particular allows you to reveal three different spellbook cards and your opponent chooses one of those cards to go straight into your hand, meaning that you can use it to help gain even FURTHER advantage with those cards. Oh, and the amount of great generic Spellcaster cards in the deck means you can splash them into whatever deck you feel like playing at the time.
That’s our entire recommended list of Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel structure decks! If you avoid the ones that we mentioned at the start, and choose from the other decks that we’ve listed, then you’ll be on your way to winning matches in no time at all.
Dishonorable Mentions
Spiral Spear Strike
Absolutely do not purchase this structure deck if you value the possibility of ever winning a duel against another human. Sure, it has some good cards such as Black Luster Soldier: Envoy of the Beginning, Chaos Space, and Eternal Chaos. But beyond that, this deck has nothing to offer you other than disappointment. The Black Luster Soldier cards aren’t very good, the extra deck cards don’t exactly offer you anything, and all of these cards are just completely useless in the long run. What exactly do you think you’re going to be able to do with the Gaia cards, for example? The answer to that is absolutely nothing other than summoning fusion monsters that are so laughably bad that they’re relegated to the self-referred ‘hard mode’ solo gates that challenge you to win a duel using these decks that couldn’t beat a GOAT format deck.
Vortex Of Magic
Look, I know you’ve seen the anime. I know you really love Yugi Muto’s primary ace card, The Dark Magician, but it’s simply not a deck that is at all viable in any competitive capacity, and it has never been. At best, this structure deck can offer you access to Magician’s Souls, a card that is often used in decks that use a lot of spells/traps in order to draw deep into their deck. Nothing else is worth your time in this structure deck, with the Kuriboh cards being laughably mediocre, and the fusion cards being too much effort to summon for a payoff that isn’t worth your time at all. This structure deck doesn’t even come with the only Dark Magician Girl card worth a damn, only having the weird variations on Dark Magician Girl that were released in the TCG back with the Dark Side of Dimensions movie pack years ago. Avoid this pack if you want your win/loss ratio to favor the win column in any regard.
Cybernetic Successor
Cybernetic Successor is a weird structure deck. Half of the structure deck actually contains rather excellent cards, with the Cyber Dragon portion of the deck actually being necessary pieces for a competent Cyber Dragon deck. The other half however is all directly related to the Cyberdark archetype, and it’s an archetype that is not only not good but is downright bad. The best thing you can really do is craft the good cards that are provided by this structure deck since that would likely cost you less in-game currency. You could even pull them from specific packs that the Cyber Dragon cards are included in. The good cards in this structure deck are:
- Cyber Twin Dragon
- Cyber End Dragon
- Cyber Dragon Core
- Cyber Emergency
- Cyber Dragon
- Cyberload Fusion
- Cyber Repair Plant
- Overload Fusion
- Power Bond
- Cyber Dragon Drei
- Cyber Dragon Vier
- Cyber Dragon Zwei
- Cyber Dragon Herz
Everything else simply isn’t worth your time at all.
Re-Contract Universe
This is the equivalent of buying three XYZ structure decks when the mechanic was first introduced. It comes with only five XYZ monsters, one of which is only notable for being the ace monster of one of the show’s protagonists None of the actual monster cards in the deck are any good either, all about spamming the board with as many levels 4 cards as possible in order to overlay into something that’s only marginally better than the base forms of these cards.
There are a couple of good spells and trap cards here in the form of XYZ change tactics and Pot of Avarice, both cards that allow you to draw. XYZ Change Tactics allows you to draw a card by paying 500LP every time you XYZ summon, which can give incredible levels of card advantage. The issue comes when all of this is pieced together. It simply isn’t a fun deck, it isn’t a competent deck and it isn’t a deck that you should pick over any other decks on this list.
Anyway, now that we’re done discussing the decks you should absolutely avoid, it’s time to move on to the best structure decks in Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel. A key point here is that we’re not discussing every single structure deck in Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel, but are discussing the upper echelon of Master Duel structure decks. We’ll be weighing up the contents of the structure deck against the inherent playability of the deck itself, and whether you can win with that deck.
