On Yugioh Master Duel. The XYZ Festival, And A Self-Destructive Metagame

Hi there! So yeah, this is not the long-awaited first segment of Night Of The Loving Dead. I assure you it's a work in progress and I'm in the "watch the show and take notes" section of things. There are so many mirror shots in this show that I didn't notice before, and thus I am in heaven. Anyway, we're putting all that on the back burner so I can spend a morning talking to you about the fucked-up meta of a limited event in a competitive trading card/free-to-play gacha game. Yes, really, but this is fresh in my mind and it's fascinating to me, and whenever that happens thousands of words pour forth from my fingers. I don't think we'll hit more than a 2 or 3k here today, but we'll find out. Together, hopefully. Let me tell you a little about Yugioh Master Duel first.

I've been a fan of the Yugioh card game for... dear God, almost 20 years now. I will spare you the nostalgic memories of 2003 and forging a friendship and circle of gamers for the time being, though I will direct you to this fun post from a few years back, an off-the-cuff piece much like this about a Yugioh video game that interested me. Even though I haven't played the card game for every one of those 20 years, I have kept an eye on things and occasionally jumped back into the fray. Such was the case a month ago when Konami stealth launched Yugioh Master Duel, an official and premium free-to-play Yugioh simulator. You can imagine the deal, I'm sure. Earn in-game currency for playing, spend it on virtual booster packs, upgrade your deck and make it better. Oh hey, they're extra generous for newcomers as well and you'll drown in gems, enough to make two or three good decks. Then the free gems dry up, and if you want to make another deck or upgrade the cards in previous decks to the high-power must-have cards? Goodness me, look at this handy dandy way to purchase gems for real money! Yeah, it's a gacha game. It very much wants you to spend real money on it. A strike against it making GOTY 2022, to be sure, but I with enough responsible willpower and some good fun decks have been enjoying it. 

Yesterday, Master Duel unveiled a new event: the XYZ Festival. "XYZ" being... God, how to explain this without a dissertation? For once I need brevity. XYZ are a special class of card within the Yugioh card game, a type of monster that can be played by placing them atop other monsters you control, which then use the materials it sits upon as fuel for various advantageous effects. Detach a material to destroy one of your opponent's cards, for instance. If I've done it right, I've put the MVP of the deck I built in preparation for the XYZ Festival to the right of this paragraph. I went with the "Zoodiac" archetype, a cool set of zodiac-themed XYZ monsters that chain into each other to make one big boss who can destroy other cards on a whim. I wasn't sure what the meta would be and what decks would be on top, but currently in ranked Master Duel a hybrid deck featuring Zoodiac and other cards is one of the best you can play. Cutting the hybrid part to play pure Zoodiac seemed like a good idea! The XYZ Festival even had its own specific list of banned cards, not only banning other special classes of cards but also banning things that wouldn't fit the spirit of the format: powerful decks which don't use XYZ cards and would dominate otherwise, or cards that specifically counter/prevent XYZ cards as their key strategy. What could go wrong?