My friend just started playing our favorite card game again.
One of the hardest card games to learn is Yu-Gi-Oh.
He asked me what the hardest decks to play out here are, I couldn’t tell him.
Each card has more than one effect, and most decks have combo loops that sometimes feel like they’re going backward.
Often, you have to do all of this while avoiding hand traps.
This is very clear in a few decks that are known for being hard to learn.
So let’s look at some decks that only a true King of Games could play to their full potential.
10. Weather Painters
One of the newest control decks for Yu-Gi-Oh is called Weather Painters.
With control decks, it’s less important to make long lines of combos and more important to control the game state.
This means managing how many cards your opponent has in their hand, stopping their combo chains with negation effects, and doing pretty much anything else you can to mess up their plan.
Weather Painters is a hard deck to play because of two things.
First, if you want to make a control deck, you need to know which cards and effects are worth stopping and when.
Second, this deck is very sensitive to where the columns are placed.
If your monster is in the wrong column, it won’t get the right effects from your Weather Canvas spells or traps, which can completely ruin your game plan.
9. Dragon Link
Modern Dragon Link decks are a mix of different types of dragons that work well together. Because of this, there are a lot of different combos to remember when playing with this deck.
The hardest thing about this deck is learning how to play through all of the different exchanges.
Even if you get lucky and get to go first, your opponent will often have traps in their hand that you need to avoid.
Because of these hand traps, it takes a lot of skill and understanding of the deck to pull off all the different combos you need. This is what makes Dragon Link such a hard deck to master.
8. Salamangreat
Even though Salamangreats is where many Yu-Gi-Oh players got their start, this deck is surprisingly hard to play well.
The best thing about this deck is that it can bring back resources again and again.
Cards like Salamangreat Jack Jaguar can be special summoned from the dead every turn. This makes it very easy to Link summon every turn.
But this deck doesn’t have much room for extra decks. The Salamangreat Link monsters get their powers by using another copy of themselves to Link summon them.
This means that each of these monsters takes up between two and three slots.
To play this deck right, you have to get this number right.
7. Phantom Knights
By getting themselves out of the graveyard, the Phantom Knight cards get benefits. Most of the time, these effects will put more Phantom Knights cards in your deck or bring monsters back to your side of the field.
But it’s very hard to get back cards that have been sent away.
There aren’t many cards that can bring back monsters that have been sent away, so if you want to play this deck well, you’ll have to learn how to handle these resources.
Managing this balance is what makes Phantom Knights so hard to play.
Sometimes it seems like a good idea to use all of these removing effects at once, and sometimes you want to leave resources in the graveyard for later.
6. Dogmatika-Shaddoll-Invoked (DSI)
This deck is kind of a mix between a combo deck and a control deck.
The whole point of DSI decks is to use fusion to call up strong floodgates and control cards.
This is made very easy by the trap card Shaddoll Schism, which lets you fuse summon Shaddoll monsters during either player’s main phase.
Like all control decks, this one is hard because you have to know when to stop your opponent.
For instance, Invoked Mechaba lets you cancel the result of any spell, trap, or monster by throwing away a card of the same type.
You can only do this once per turn, though, so to make this deck really shine, you need to know which effects are worth canceling.
5. Code Talker
Code Talkers isn’t a danger that will change the way the game is played, but if you want to play a challenging Link deck, this is the one for you.
Even though the deck’s combo lines are pretty reliable, Code Talkers have a low cap.
This means that this deck doesn’t have a lot of power at its peak.
A good combo line can end with Accesscode Talker and maybe Decode Talker Heatsoul, but there are other decks that can do this and more.
If you want to play Code Talker’s right, you need to make the most of every card.
If you can only end your turn with a couple of Link monsters, you need to make sure you pick the right ones for the case.
4. Synchron
As of this writing, Synchrons are without a doubt one of the best synchro decks out there.
But with a lot of power comes a lot of big chains of hits.
With Synchrons, the sky is the limit, but you’ll need to know a lot about each combo line to get there.
Cards like T.G. Hyper Librarian let you draw 5–10 cards in a single turn, so you have almost endless resources at your disposal.
However, it takes a lot of skill to make the most of each card to keep your chain of synchro summons going.
3. Sunavalon
In 2022, Sunavalons are one of the few cards that still need regular monsters.
This plant deck is all about Link using the normal monster Sunseed Genus Loci to call stronger monsters by using it over and over again.
The biggest problem with this deck is that its combos are very easy to break. Most of the time, your Link monsters have 0 attack points and let you turn fight damage into life point gains and special summons.
If the benefits of these Link monsters are cancelled, all you have left are a bunch of monsters with 0 attack in attack position.
2. Nekroz
When it comes to ritual decks, Nekroz is the best there is.
When this deck came out, it completely took over the meta game, and it has been played at a rogue level nonstop ever since.
The hardest thing about this deck is that, unlike other ritual decks, you have to match the levels of the monsters you sacrifice when you use a ritual call.
This can really limit your choices when it comes to ritual summons, since you can’t just sacrifice high-level monsters for lower-level ones.
1. D/D/D
People say that the D/D/D deck is one of the hardest to master in Yu-Gi-Oh.
This deck tries to use every type of Extra deck summoning that it can.
Fusion, Synchro, XYZ, Pendulum, and Link monsters are all important parts of this deck’s plan, and it can be very hard to get the balance right between all of these types.
On top of that, the Dark Contracts, which are ongoing spells and traps, burn you for 1000 damage each during your standby phase.
For this deck to work, you have to know when to get rid of these Dark Contracts and when to take the burn damage. If you want something more fun and easygoing, you might want to look elsewhere.
