When you’re developing new gameplay, there’s only so much you can do by Deck-building and theory-crafting. To see how players really valued different classes of cards, we needed to run actual internal tournaments. So we gathered up every test subject Duelist we’ve got (myself excepted since someone had to run it and do the analysis) and did internal tournament testing!

The top Duelists from internal testing got their Decks added into the Rivalry of Warlords pool (after some point adjustments based on the tournament results). We also added the Morganite Spirit Deck, which was from a test tournament run by our colleagues in Japan. It was just too cool a concept to leave out!

The tournament setting revealed some very interesting player behavior! The first thing of note is that our Duelists were absolutely taking it seriously. For example, we had one player who dedicated himself to trying to make some of the many FTKs from the history of the Advanced Format work, but he struggled to win Duels let alone Matches – even against competition that wasn’t playing many defensive cards.

Which brings me to the most important takeaway: The first instinct of most of our players was to simply drop all defensive cards (Ash Blossom, Effect Veiler and the like) and spend all their points on consistency cards (Reinforcement of the Army, etc.). What they learned very quickly is that just because you can’t initiate cold fusion by fielding 2 Effect Monsters, doesn’t mean it’s safe to play with zero first-turn interaction at all! The number 1 regret of Duelists after the first tournament was not putting any Effect Veiler or similar cards in their Deck. The one player who included Droll & Lock Bird in his Deck on the other hand was extremely glad he did, and he managed an excellent 3^rd place finish!

A lot of cards have changed costs since that first tournament (which was the whole point of that and additional testing), but the important takeaway here is that investing all your points into consistency and engine cards while ignoring defense and removal is a dangerous game. It could work out for you if, for instance, you’ve come up with a True King of All Calamities Deck that can ignore or suppress the opponent’s field going second then set up the Rank 9 Xyz, but that requires much more involved and specialized construction. In the end it’s up to you to decide how to spend your points!

We’re excited to see where you guys take Genesys! Will your thinking end up like our initial testers did? Will the point adjustments we made after that mean that you’ll skip that phase and Genesys will move right away into a new and different era? We’re about to find out!