Hello there and welcome to this informative guide. Here I'll only give some starting information and tips to encourage players to play the game and understand the economy from the perspective of a F2P player.

I believe talking about the main currency is a right way to start. With Gems you can open Packs and other goodies in the Shop. You get Gems by leveling your Account, completing Missions, leveling the Duel Pass, and buying them with money.

As a new player, you'll get A LOT of Gems thanks to the Beginner Missions. Don't spend them right away, even if you get to the 10K Gem cap. You'll be able to collect exceeding Gems from the Gifts button.

The first thing you should buy with these Gems is the Duel Pass, which costs 700 Gems. This is a typical Battle Pass with a nice twist: You'll get your 700 Gems back while leveling through it. With the Duel Pass, you'll get a high value of resources and goodies, and you should always save 700 Gems in your account for the Duel Pass.

There's three Normal Packs available in the Shop: Two timed ones and the Master Pack. Never buy from the Master Pack, since it has every single card available and it's practically impossible to get what you want.



Secret Packs are your main source of cards, but at first you won't be able to see them in the Shop. These Packs include all of the cards from a specific archetype, with some fillers. For example, the Cosmic Mechanical Entities Secret Pack include Krawlers, Mekk-Knights and Knightmares. You need to unlock them. I'll explain how this works in the Card Crafting section.



The Bonus Pack is a nice filler Pack which can only be opened by spending Tickets. You get these tickets from playing Duels or completing Missions. Open them when you have them, they're free!



Depends on you. If you're interested in the archetype, you can get a lot of useful cards at once for 500 Gems. The downside is that you only get one copy of each card, and that is the reason why they can (and should) be bought three times.

Card Crafting is what makes Master Duel a nice F2P game in my opinion. You'll be able to craft any specific card you want if you have the Crafting Points (CP) available.



Crafting Points are divided by Rarity (N, R, SR and UR, just like the cards). For example, If you want to craft an UR card, you'll only spend UR Crafting Points. These Crafting Points are obtained by leveling the Duel Pass, completing Missions and dismantling cards you don't need. It's very intuitive.



It costs 30 CP to craft any card, regardless of rarity, and dismantling a card will give you 10 CP. So normally, you'll dismantle three cards to craft one.

The exception to this are Glossy and Royal-Finished cards, which are cosmetics effects for your cards. If you dismantle a Glossy card you'll get 15 CP, and a Royal-Finished card will give you 30 CP. There's a chance to get these special cards when opening Packs or crafting them.

But you won't always have enough CP to craft the cards you need. When that happens, your only solution will be to open Packs. So, which one do you need to open?

The first answer to that question is "Not the Master Pack". The second one will be answered by the cards themselves. Let's say we want to craft a Cyber Dragon Deck from scratch. Where do I begin? Let's search for a card of that Deck, in this case, Cyber Dragon Nova. There's a nice button at the bottom of the selected card titled "How to Obtain" which tells you which Pack has the card.



As you can see, you can get Cyber Dragon Nova from the Pearlescent Cyber Dragons Secret Pack. As I said in the Secret Packs section, Secret Packs include all the cards from a specific archetype. So now that we know that we can get all the Cyber Dragon related cards from this Secret Pack, we only need to unlock it.

To unlock a Secret Pack, you simply need to craft a SR or UR card from the Secret Pack you want to unlock. Doing this we force the Secret Pack to appear in the Shop for 24 hours and you can start pulling from it. After 24 hours, the Secret Pack will vanish from the Shop and you'll need to unlock it again.

*Note: This is not the only way to unlock Secret Packs, but it's the easiest. You can also unlock Secret Packs when you get SR or UR cards from other Packs or clearing the Solo Campaigns.

This is a very simple way to get 1000 Gems (10 Packs, or whatever cosmetic or bundle you want) every single week with minimum grinding.



For this method we'll just make use of our Daily Missions. The Daily Missions are:

• Normal Summon a monster 3 times.
  
• Special Summon a monster 3 times.
  
• Activate 3 Spells.
  
• Activate 2 Traps.
  
• Ritual/Synchro/Xyz Summon a monster 3 times.
  
• Fusion/Pendulum/Link Summon a monster 3 times.
  
• Destroy a card 5 times.
  
• Win a Duel.
  
• Duel in Solo Mode 3 times.

If you don't complete your Daily Missions, they'll stack until you have all 9 of them available to complete. This is exactly what we want.

Once we have the 9 Daily Missions, we can start Duelling*. Depending on your Deck, you can potentially complete more than 3 in only one or two Duels.
*This doesn't mean you can't play the game until you have the 9 Daily Missions, just don't complete any until you have all of them.

This is the important part: Claim only 3 Missions that your Deck is able to easily complete.
For example: My main Deck is Labrynth, so I can easily complete the Special Summon, Trap, Destroy Cards and of course Win Missions. Normal Summon and Spell are harder, so if I complete them I won't claim them. The other Summon missions are impossible for my Deck so I just ignore them, and the Solo Mode one is a free one.

Bonus tip: At the end of the month all your Missions will reset if you don't claim them, which is the purpose of the Days Left counter on every Mission. Claim all Missions you have completed on the last day to get a bit more Gems, then wait until you have all 9 Missions again to restart the method.

Claiming only those 3 Missions guarantees that those same Missions will be available again on the next Daily Reset (10:00 AM PST) so you can farm the same 3 Missions every day.

Claiming 3 Daily Missions grants us 120 Gems (40 each). Now we just need to claim two more things: Daily Login and DUEL LIVE.



For the Daily Login, just go to the Login section in the Missions menu, and claim your Daily Login, which will grant you 20 Gems daily or 50 Gems only in your 10th and 20th Login of the month.



For the Duel LIVE, just go to the DUEL LIVE button in the upper menu and watch any replay posted there. You don't even have to watch it, just start a replay and exit whenever you can. This will grant you an additional 5 Gems daily once you claim it.

In total, you'll get 145 Gems daily*, which means exactly 1015 Gems a week.
*175 in your 10th and 20th login of the month.

On the 2nd Anniversary celebration of Master Duel, Konami has deployed a Referral system for new players and returnees that haven't played in more than a month since their last login. You will be able to claim a Free 'Sword of Souls' Structure Deck, which is an easy to learn, solid and competitive Synchro-based Deck of the Swordsoul archetype. You'll be able to claim even more rewards such as Gems if you manage to reach Bronze 4 in Ranked!
Here's how to do it.



Go to the Friends section, in the upper right corner.

You'll get this screen, click on "Rookie and Returner Follower Campaign". Then click on "Enter Campaign Code"











You can find a lot of codes to enter in the Master Duel's Subreddit Code Megathread here!

• Plan your resources carefully. Keep an eye on your CPs. You know that crafting one card cost 30 CP and dismantling a basic foil card gives you 10. Do math, use the calculator. Plan what you can craft and you cannot, which card has priority and which card doesn't. Save CPs to unlock a Secret Pack and spend the Gems you need in those 24 hours. The first week you'll be flooding in Gems, but after that you'll start getting less. Again, be careful and plan your spending.
  
  
• When pulling from Packs, always pull 10 Packs at once. There are SR and UR guarantees pulling this way. This is written in the Details > Important Notes section on every Pack.
  
  
• Buy the Duel Pass with your starting Gems. It has an insane value and you only need to Duel other players to level through it, no specific missions or anything. Remember that the Duel Pass will give you back the 700 Gems you used to buy it, so always save 700 Gems to get the Duel Pass!
  
  
• Clear the Solo Campaigns. They give you Starter Decks, Gems, Account XP and help you progress through the Beginner Missions.
  
  
• Research on your own. As a new player, search for archetypes or playstyles you'd enjoy. Watch videos and read about them to decide what it's fun for you. A nice place to start is Master Duel Meta[www.masterduelmeta.com] website, which has a Tier List based on Weekly Community Tournaments and lists for the most played Decks every season.
  
  
• If you're not sure about what to play and don't want to commit to a playstyle yet, play Swordsoul. It's a consistent, meta-resilient and competitive Synchro Deck with very simple combos. It's what could be considered a "Midrange Deck" in other TCGs. You can easily get it in 2024 since it has a Structure Deck available in the shop, and you can get one for free using a code in the Referral campaign (Instructions in the section above).
  
  
• Read the cards. Take your time, turn times are long so you have time to read what your opponent effects do. Never attack going blind.
  
  
• Don't get discouraged when your opponent throws at you a 3 minute combo in the first turn and OTK's you on your first ever Ranked match. Everyone has been there. Learn about cards which negates the effects of your opponent's and plan to get them. Again, research on your own and watch videos about how to use or how to fight certain Decks. For me, one of the best things of Yu-Gi-Oh! is the theorycrafting.
  
  
• Losing doesn't mean your Deck doesn't work. Strategy is very different from luck, and in TCG games you always need luck. If you have a bad hand and your opponent don't, it's not your fault. It happens.

I hope you found this guide informative and I hope even more that you enjoy Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel more thanks to that. Yu-Gi-Oh! is an amazing TCG that has been neglected in the digital side for a long time, and I really wish this game succeeds and has a recognition similar to Hearthstone's.

Now go there and become the King of Games!