Author: Dan

What’s a Normal Summon? “Normal Summon” has an official meaning in Yu-Gi-Oh, but in the competitive scene we use the term to refer to a card that requires your once-per-turn Normal Summon action to fully realize its potential. Normal Summons are tricky: you can only use one of them every turn, even if you have more than one in your hand. Having too many Normal Summons can slow you down, effectively sticking you with dead cards; if you have three Normal Summons in your hand and can’t use two of them, your hand performs like you have three cards that…

Read More

In any given format, there are only 200 or so cards that see active competitive play. If you were to look at data from the current format, and count the number of cards with a greater than 0.01% chance of appearing in a tournament match, you’d find 184 cards. And in Yu-Gi-Oh, you can only play a maximum of 90 different cards in one deck. So if we’re speaking objectively, even if the best deck in competition and the best deck to beat it both played 90 totally unique cards, there would still be 4 cards in that 184 that…

Read More

Speed Duels offer a different experience playing Yu-Gi-Oh. They’re a great way to teach new players about the game, without throwing them straight into the complexity of full Master Rule play. But the Speed Duel format’s more than just a learning tool for beginners. It’s been a place for cool reprints, amazing foil upgrades, and it’s even imported a few of those 20 year-old Normal Monsters we never got from the Japanese OCG. The most notable difference is the use of Skill Cards, a new type of card exclusive to Speed Duels that brings fresh new concepts to old strategies. Competition in…

Read More

There are two things that dictate the value of an item: the supply, how much of it there is; and the demand, how many people want it. The lower the supply and the higher the demand, the higher the price it can fetch. Supply is a fixed value. It’s tied to production, resource availability, and distribution. There will never be more 1st Edition LOB Blue-Eyes White Dragons. But the key factor in the Yu-Gi-Oh market is demand. When a lot more people want a card, its price rises accordingly. Usually the demand for a card is tied to its viability in tournament…

Read More