Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duelbecame the center of controversy and debate at theYu-Gi-Oh! World Championshipsthis past weekend. The tournament started off with a shock for players of the 3v3Master Duelformat, when early on in Swiss rounds, the majority of their deck lists appeared online.
The decks appeared on the websiteMasterDuelMeta, a resource website for those trying to improve their play in the game. This immediately bristled against portions of theYu-Gi-Oh!community, including competitive players at the World Championship.
The founder of MasterDuelMeta and its sister site DuelLinksMeta, content creator Dkayed,posted a Twitch clip to Twitterexplaining his reason for posting the lists. He explained, “what happens at Worlds is [that] players at home, not at the event venue, they will scour through all the replays… they create spreadsheets. And then they link the spreadsheet to a few amount of players, only to their friends… that, in my opinion, is an unfair advantage.”
His evidence for these claims were his own first-hand experience at the World Championships. Dkayed also explained that he had done the same thing on this website last year when covering theMaster Duelchampionships, and that all of this information is accessible through theMaster Duelclient itself.
The deck lists were also compiled using the third party app Untapped.gg. Untapped tweeted on theirYu-Gi-Oh!account on September 8 saying they had fixed the issue that made this possible on their end.
This situation rapidly became a subject of debate on the MasterDuelMeta website,Yu-Gi-Oh!subreddits, and X, formerly Twitter. The conversation on X took on another dimension when one player attending the World Championships,JudeuYGO, posted a comment on MasterDuelMetaexpressing distaste for this kind of coverage. In part, the comment reads, “You don’t care about the competitive environment, you don’t care about how your actions affects [sic] the players at worlds. You just want to grab as much money as possible.”
This comment was addressed directly by Dkayed on his Twitch stream. After reading the comment on stream, Dkayed replied, in part, by saying: “JudeuYGO possibly, likely, is upset that his friends at home watching Worlds can’t secretly give JudeuYGO the secret techs where no one else will have that… So, Judeu, I’m sorry you are now on an even playing field.” These claims were clipped out of his Twitch stream andposted to social media, which quickly fed more debates and reactions leading “Dkayed” to trend on X for portions of the weekend.
Konami does not operate its competitive events under “open deck” rules, so this leak could possibly constitute a violation of their tournament policy. At the time of reporting, Konami has made no public statements about the incident, and there have been no reports from the individuals involved of Konami taking action.
Despite the deck list leak, the Master Duel event at Worlds proceeded as scheduled through Saturday and concluded Sunday with a rematch between the 1st and 2nd place teams of last year’s World Championship final.
