I haven’t played Yu-Gi-Oh! in nearly a decade, however, after visiting my friends at the Yu-Gi-Oh! booth at New York Comic-Con this past weekend, I’ll be hard-pressed not to get back into the game.
Upon reaching the booth, I was quickly introduced to the Yu-Gi-Oh! Marketing Specialist, Robert Boyajian, who took me on a tour of some of the current and upcoming sets, including the next set that will feature Maximillion Pegasus, The Legendary Duelist 2, set for release in 2018.
The Legendary Duelist 2 set will feature Maximillion Pegasus, but won’t feature any of Pegasus’ Toon Monsters, instead focusing on monsters such as Thousand-Eyes Restrict
That immediately piqued my interest, as it has been over a decade since a set released featuring the primary antagonist of the TV Tokyo Yu-Gi-Oh! anime. However, the big feature at this year’s booth was the recently released Legendary Dragon Decks set. Each deck in the set features a Dragon archetype deck from Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX and Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V (read as Arc Five.)
The first deck features cards from the Waking the Dragons arc, the one synonymous with the Seal of Orichalcos. Robert and I took the time to reminisce about the Waking the Dragons arc as we took a look at some of the cards featured in the deck, including Dark Magician The Dragon Knight, which is pretty much a rarity within itself. The other decks that are featured were the Cyber Dragons, made famous in the anime by Ryo Marafuji/Zane Truesdale in the GX series, as well as ARC-V’s Odd-Eyes Pendulum Dragon, the staple card of Yuya Sakaki.
But at that point, it was time to head over to the Duel Links portion, where we got to speak and play against with one of the devs behind the game. They were quite pleased with how the game took off, as well as the response to both the original game and the GX update that recently released. We even got an opportunity to check out the PC version of Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links while we were playing on the giant screens.
As you can see in the picture above, the Steam PC release will feature card information on the left side of the screen, as well as your gameplay log on the right, making for a fantastic way for people to keep track of their moves within a speed duel. Although I was handily defeated by the dev I was playing against, it was still an enjoyable experience, as the speed duel format allows for quick, yet engaging gameplay, as proven by the popularity of Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links.
The morning ended with me taking the opportunity to get my picture taken to be immortalized as a token for the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG. It was a pretty painless experiment, which took no less than 2 minutes to get done. Although taking a picture with Manjome Thunder/Chazz Princeton in the background wasn’t an option, I was pretty happy with being able to rock with Jaden Yuki in my background, being a fan of the Elemental HERO archetype.
If you haven’t taken the opportunity to get into Yu-Gi-Oh! or even to play Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links, you definitely should take up the opportunity to check out what the TCG has to offer at your local hobby shop. As for my day with the Yu-Gi-Oh! team, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.