Yu-Gi-Oh!: The 10 Best Formats (2024)

Yu-Gi-Oh has been around for a couple of decades, with many different cards and play styles rotating throughout the years. Over time, many players come and go, but eventually, nostalgia summons duelists back. Compared to Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh has been light on officially supported formats, with fans instead homegrowing their own communities to play legacy formats.

Many of these formats in Yu-Gi-Oh coincide with popular anime series airing at the time, such as Yu-Gi-Oh GX and Yu-Gi-Oh 5D. Some popular formats are balanced, while others embrace chaotic and destructive play. Konami has launched a few alternative formats themselves, offering alternatives to the standard style of play.

10 Yugi Kaiba

The original format that Yu-Gi-Oh started with is now called Yugi Kaiba. Yugi Kaiba is essentially a combination of Legend of Blue Eyes and the Yugi and Kaiba starter decks. The format is the simplest one available, which gives it its own flair, along with some heavy nostalgia.

There aren’t many effect monsters in this format, so much of the action comes down to beatdown or stall decks. The monsters with the highest attack and lowest tribute cost are the most valuable. Surprisingly, the format has a handful of playable deck types and some fun interactions with trap cards like Waboku and Reinforcements.

9 Reaper

Despite the Reaper format drawing its card pool only a few months after the more popular Goat format, the two formats play incredibly differently. The Reaper format is named after a popular card from that time, Spirit Reaper, a card that is hard to destroy and can force your opponent to discard a card from their hand.

Its attributes largely defined this era, as it was much more defensively oriented, and the goals of many decks were to attack their opponents’ hands. Popular decks like Zombies were among the leading archetypes. Reaper is less versatile than Goat but tends to have games heavier on resource management due to the abundance of defensive cards.

8 Duel Links

Similar to Speed Duels, Duel Links is a fast-paced version of Yu-Gi-Oh, but it is exclusively a digital game. Duel Links includes online currencies, experience points, and other unlockables that make it more of a video game than the other versions of the format.

Duel Links features cards that are not available in any physical versions of the game, making it inherently different. It also has its own ban list and offers a wide variety of special abilities that players can use to influence the game.

7 Advanced

The main format that Konami supports, and the most popular one, is Advanced, and every set launched by Konami is usually playable in the Advanced format. What separates Advanced from Traditional is the ban list of incredibly powerful cards; over time, some cards are deemed too powerful and are prohibited, while other cards are no longer seen as game-breaking and are unbanned.

Advanced essentially represents the modern meta for Yu-Gi-Oh, fast-paced and combo-based where most playable cards in Advanced have a wide variety of effects, and duels often last only a few turns. Advanced is likely the biggest financial investment in Yu-Gi-Oh since you always need to buy the newest set to keep up.

6 Speed Duels

For those who want to play at a quicker pace, Speed Duels is an option. Speed Duels resemble how duels were played in the original version of Yu-Gi-Oh, where players can only have three monsters on the field at once, have 20-30 cards in their deck, and start with only 4,000 life points.

Konami still supports Speed Duels and launches cards that can only be used in this format. Speed Duel cards are quite cheap, and Speed Duels, in general, are likely the most affordable format in Yu-Gi-Oh, which is a major advantage in a game that is otherwise cost-prohibitive.

5 Hat

Yu-Gi-Oh was revamped when Link monsters were introduced, so Hat, which was one of the last formats before Links became prominent, has a lot of merit. This format offers decks that balance control and aggro. Hat is short for Hands, Artifacts, and Traptrix, the prominent deck after which the format is named.

For players who are used to older styles, Hat is a good format if you want to get a feel for hand traps. In general, Hat is incredibly trap-dominant, so for those who enjoy back-and-forth dueling and lots of seesaw action, it's worth checking out.

4 Duelist Alliance

One of the highest-rated formats was the Duelist Alliance format; this was the format that made Pendulum Summoning a staple while maintaining an exciting meta with XYZ Summoning. Duelist Alliance was a time of experimentation and fusion of tactics, with decks often incorporating Synchro, XYZ, and Pendulum Summoning.

While Duelist Alliance was a dynamic set with many fond memories, it has not yet developed a large online community. It is possible that if more people played it, it would become a “solved” format, but Duelist Alliance seems to be the legacy format with the highest potential for fun.

3 Tengu Plant

Even though Tengu Plant coincides with the start of the XYZ era, its card pool better represents Yu-Gi-Oh 5D. Synchro Summoning was still a primary tactic during the Tengu Plant era. Tengu Plant gained popularity as a callback to more resource management, as Yu-Gi-Oh had become much faster by this point.

While Tengu Plant was slower-paced than formats around its period, it was still combo-centric. Much of Tengu Plant revolves around buying time and gaining resources to achieve a one-turn KO against your opponent.

2 Edison

Named after the location of the 2010 World Tournament, Edison represents the Yu-Gi-Oh GX era. Compared to Goat, Edison is more explosive and faster but still not as combo-heavy as later variants of the game.

Edison surpassed Goat as the most popular legacy format in part due to the affordability of its cards. Troublesome cards that provided significant hand advantages, such as Graceful Charity, Delinquent Duo, and Pot of Greed, are prohibited in Edison. The format also features a larger variety of competitive decks than most other Yu-Gi-Oh formats.

1 Goat

The first legacy format that brought retro Yu-Gi-Oh back was Goat format, which uses the same rules and card pool from April 2005. For those nostalgic for the Battle City arc in Yu-Gi-Oh, there are many familiar cards in Goat format, which gets its name from the popularity of Scapegoat in 2005.

However, the meta for this format has evolved, and Goat Control is no longer the dominant deck; instead, Chaos variants reign supreme. Goat format is arguably the last format before Yu-Gi-Oh became a much faster TCG, and it is a format that many Magic: The Gathering players enjoy due to its controlled pace. A good number of Goat cards are some of the more expensive cards from the Duel Monster era, making it more difficult to get into than Edison.