New player guide: What packs to buy first?

If you recently picked up Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links you might be overwhelmed by the amount of boxes that are already released, which makes it very confusing for new players to know what box they should invest their gems in. Currently there are 11 Main boxes and 10 Mini boxes.

If you find yourself in that position, we will explain what box you should first consider investing in and what cards to exchange for the SR tickets that will be given to you to make your first competitive PvP deck. Although some players would say to wait before spending gems, and to farm cards first, this is very discouraging for new players because everyone just wants to have fun when playing this game. So in our opinion it’s best to have a cheap, good PvP deck, and then start saving gems for a more expensive deck that also requires you to farm for other cards.

We would advise people to look into a Sylvan deck (box: Rampage of the Forest) and an Alien deck (box: Abyss Encounter). These decks are both able to reach King of Games easily.

Sylvan seems to be THE deck to play right now because it’s very explosive and very consistent, Alien is a slower deck that tries to control the board state more.

On average you will only need to buy have of the main box Abyss Encounter to have all the alien cards that you need, however for a Sylvan deck you will need to reset the box one or two times to have 2-3 copies of Sylvan Komushroomo.

The Core of your Alien deck will be these 14 cards, but since the minimum amount of cards for a deck is 20, you’ll want to add 6 more cards to that. (In most cases an optimal deck only contains 20 cards, this is to raise the consistency of drawing your better cards.)

Some good picks to fill up those 6 slots will be Alien Kid, Alien Grey, Mysterious Triangle and Enemy Controller. Mysterious Triangle is an SR from the Abyssal Encounters pack and there is a good chance that you picked up at least one while searching for the core R cards, but if you didn’t, do not worry, it is not needed to play this deck. You will obtain one copy of Enemy Controller by completing the bingo missions when you first start playing, but you can obtain more copies by exchanging some of the SR tickets you will receive during the first days that you login, and we highly advise you to get 3 copies of Enemy Controller as it has been a very strong spell since the release of this game.

Abyss Encounter

The core cards of this deck are Rare (R), and there are 6 copies of each Rare card in a box with 200 packs, which means that if you would buy all those 200 packs without resetting the box, you will end up by owning 6 copies of each Rare card (and also 2 copies of each SR card and 1 copy of each UR card). Whenever you buy a pack there will be at least one R or higher card in that pack, which means that on average to get 3 copies of a Rare card you’ll have to buy 100 packs. So depending on your luck, you will have assembled all the cards needed for this Alien deck after buying about 100 packs (100 packs will cost 5000 gems).

A good skill to use with this deck is “Restart”. Bandit Keith can learn this skill by leveling up, however you first need to unlock Bandit Keith as a playable character which could take a bit. For this we recommend you start out the game by picking Seto Kaiba, and while playing PvP with this deck you will have a chance of the skill “Restart” dropping after a duel (it will become available with Seto Kaiba). Yami Yugi cannot learn this skill which is why we recommend starting out with Seto Kaiba, but even if you did start with Yami Yugi, you can still unlock all those other characters and the restart skill later on, it will just take a bit more time.

A great advantage about buying from this box is that it holds a lot of useful and powerful cards for other decks, which you could look into later on.

A Sylvan deck is pretty easy to build because all monsters except Rose Lover come from the same box, and the most popular spell, Enemy Controller, can be easily picked up with SR tickets and the Bingo Mission.

An optimal Sylvan deck would run 3 copies of Sylvan Komushroomo, however many have hit KoG with only 2 copies. You could add Magical Merchant to try and replace its spot.

Rose Lover is a card from the Card Trader, which can be exchanged for SR tickets as well, however we would advise you to wait and use your tickets on ticket exclusive cards.

Most People only run 4-5 spells/traps in their deck, these spells/traps range widely. Here are some popular picks; Enemy Controller, Ultimate Providence, Divine Wrath, Tribute to The Doomed, Dark Core.

Almost all people run the skill Restart with their Sylvan deck as well, because you want to look for a Sylvan Komushroomo in your opening hand to start excavating a lot of cards.

Rampage of the Forest

Currently these are the boxes we would NOT advise you to spend gems on if you want to focus on being competitive first;

Age of Discovery, Wonders of the Sky, Chaotic Compliance, Land of the Titans, Echoes of Silence, Resonance of Contrast

Although these boxes have cards that might see use again in the future they currently don’t hold many (or any) UR/SRs that are viable in this meta or hold an archetype around which a META deck can be made.

Valkyrie’s Rage isn’t a great box ether currently, it holds some good cards like Soul Exchange and Nobleman of Extermination, but no cards that are actually needed right now in meta decks. So for now you might want to skip it and maybe buy from it in the future when the cards in that box become more relevant.

We also do not recommend buying any of the structure decks as they simply are not good, except for the latest structure deck, Destiny Rulers which does hold a lot of potential however you’ll have to buy it multiple times, which isn’t possible which just gems.

If you are very new to the game, you might not know this but every card you see on the summary screen of a box with a number written on top of it, is the amount of times that card is in that box, meaning if you buy every last pack from a box you will get every card that you saw, this is a great system because it means that you will get the cards you want at some point, yes there is still a bit of luck involved, but you won’t be that unlucky that you never would get the card (which is the case for other games). Because of this system you can actually decide when to reset a box and put in all the cards again to try and get multiple copies.

If you are going to go multiple times through a box (for example Neo-Impact to build a Cyber angels deck) I’ll provide a list of cards for each box that you maybe should consider going for in case you are already deep into the box. If you are only 20 packs into a box and got the card you want you should of course reset, but if there are only 50 cards remaining in a box after you have gotten the card you want, you should carefully consider if it’s worth it to continue for a card you might need in the future. I’ll only include URs for the main boxes as you’ll probably get every SR 3 times when going through a box more than once. However since mini boxes only contain the SRs once I’ll also include those in the list.

Some commonly used terms:

King of Games (KoG): This is the highest rank you can obtain on the PvP ladder

Farm(ing): Farming is when you beat a legendary duelist over and over again with a specific deck that can get you a lot of rewards at the end of the duel, which in term increases the chance that a rare card would drop.

UR: An Ultra Rare card, the highest rarity currently in Duel Links. In each box only one copy of each UR is included.

SR: A Super rare card. In a main box (200 packs), each SR will have 2 copies included, while in a mini box (80 packs) there will only be one copy of each SR in that box

Resetting a box: If you are looking to get multiple copies of a UR/SR card from a box, you might want to reset the box when you get it in the first couple of packs, which will put the amount of packs back at 200 or 80 (depending on the box) so you can pull it again.

Backrow: When talking about backrow, it is referring to spells/traps, which are cards that are placed on the row below your monsters on the field. (frontrow = monsters)

Skill: In Duel Links you can link a skill to a deck, which will add some sort of advantage. Each character has their own unique exclusive skills that they can learn from levelling up, but they can also obtain skills through a random drop when you duel against Legendary Duelists or PvP.

Legendary Duelist: A legendary duelist is a character from the TV show, these duelists can drop more precious rewards than standard duelists.

SDs: Standard duelists are the generic duelists you will see in the overworld which you can beat to get keys. The keys can be used at the gate to duel Legendary Duelists.

Card Trader: This character stands in front of the shop and you can interact with him to exchange materials (gold, jewels) for cards he offers. The card trader changes his wares every 8 hours, and the timer only starts when you view him.

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