Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel

Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel

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Card Placement and You
By thegwall
General tips and tricks concerning card columns and what they mean for you and your opponent.
   
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Introduction
If you’re a starting player, or returning to YGO after a long hiatus, there’s a good chance that you don’t really think about where you’re putting your cards on the field. Nowadays there is actually a surprising amount of depth for card placement and what it means for you and your opponent. Famously, one of the biggest unofficial YGO simulators did not even require you to choose the columns for your cards by default until the late 2010’s, with the addition of Link Monsters, and other good cards that interacted with columns more intensely.
Remember, you are never metagaming hard enough.
General Protocol

Mekk-Knights are an archetype of monsters that Special Summon themselves from the hand. However, they can only do so if the column is occupied by 2 or more cards. So in general, try not place monster cards and Spell/Trap cards in the same column.
Yes, you are doing something just for a chance at inconveniencing an archetype that is not currently a meta contender. If you’ve ever had somebody explain to you why Legacy of Yata-Garasu is objectively superior to Jar of Greed, the logic remains the same. If there’s no increase in cost or risk, then it’s worth the minuscule chance that it’ll ever matter at all.
This is just a rule of thumb, of course. If this conflicts with something else that you’re trying to do, feel free to ignore this advice for that moment.
The Imperm Column

If you’re not setting your Infinite Impermanence in the middle column, start doing so.
Master Duel features no indicator whatsoever for the column your Imperm was activated in. You’d be surprised how many people space out and activate S/Ts in the middle column immediately after you fire an Imperm off there, only for it to be negated.
The Last Card

In Poker and other card-related activities, a tell refers to a behavioral pattern in someone, usually a subconscious one, that may refer their opponent to information that they did not intend their opponent to know. In the case of Master Duel, when setting Spells and Traps before ending their turn, people tend to set their most powerful or most important card last.
If you’re in a situation where you have to remove set S/Ts while completely in the blind, press the Duel Log Button in the lower right of the screen and check the card that your opponent set last. If you hit that card, you have a higher chance of hitting a good card.
Of course, this also works in reverse. Try not to set your best card last. It always helps to remove tells.
1 Comments
HeraldOfOpera 27 Jun @ 4:19pm 
In a similar vein to Mekk-Knights, there's also Relinquished Anima and Geonator Transverser. If you have a non-Link that you really don't want getting hit with non-target non-destroy removal, put it in the one spot neither of those cover (no, the Extra Monster Zone isn't safe either because Chimeratech Megafleet Dragon also exists. That one's even nastier because it isn't even technically a card effect and thus bypasses all defenses like Kaiju do).