There are also spell cards that help special summon monsters from your extra deck and than there are those that help recall monsters from the field back to your hand, there are a number of different use cases. They can also be used in other ways, such as retrieving a specific card from your deck or bringing a monster back from the graveyard. While what Yugi says is true during Episode 2, these can do more than just increase your monsters strength. With no magic in your deck, your monsters will get creamed every time.” ~ Yugi “Duel Monsters is all about combining your monster cards with your magic cards to increase their strength. If your deck only consists of monster cards, you’re going to end up like Joey from Episode 2 real fast! That episode also points out a very important factor of which Joey had yet to learn from that point. Let’s say for the sake of this example, there is one.īrilliant! Next up, the Lock Cat mentions you have to play this in Face up Defence Position, which is excellent in our case because Watch Cat has a lot of Defence points! The last piece of information “It’s effects are negated” simply means Watch cat can not activate it’s effect!Īnother key element to dueling is to always make sure you have enough Spell and Trap cards.
It wants you to find a Level 1 of this type in your graveyard, if one is there. There are many types of monsters, but let’s stick to “Beast” for now. These are secondary monster traits that are listed in the description alongside the effects title in brackets, as you can see Lock Cat has this also. Next, it talks about a “Beast-Type” monster. Because it’s below level 4, we can do that without a problem here. It’s effects are negated.”įirst up, we can see this effect is only activated once this card is normal summoned. “When this is Normal Summoned, you can select 1 level 1 beast-Type monster in your Graveyard and Special Summon it in face-up Defence Position. This card example of the Lock Cat is an Orange Monster card and shows it has an “effect” in it’s description. Orange Monster cards have “Effects” that can be used in battle that may turn the tides in your favour.
If it’s a Yellow card (Like the Blue-Eyes White Dragon for example) then it will contain just a simple description of the monster that is just for fun. The description can contain several pieces of information depending on the card type.
To the far right is the bar code identification that can be used to search for this specific card online, telling you if it’s a Rare or Common card, very useful when determining a cards price value. Sometimes this information can be found below the description box of the card. We’ll get into Summoning Types later on.īelow the picture in the bottom left hand corner, shows this card is a 1st Edition, usually just telling which generation the card is from. Any card that is above level 4 can not be normal summoned and must have it’s other conditions be met before it can be played. Any monster from level 1-4 can be normally summoned (unless stated otherwise by the card itself). It’s not something to be too concerned about, but usually a safe bet to be considerate of if you plan on structuring a deck based around a single attribute type.īelow that, there are dragonball- erhmm… Stars that represent a monsters summoning level. This only matters if another card mentions a specific attribute type in it’s description, then all monsters with that attribute are affected. Next to it’s name, you can see what type of attribute this monster has. Straight away, the first things to catch your eye is the Name and the picture of this magnificent creature! While cool looking, these are the least important factors of the card. Let’s have a look at an iconic monster from the series, the Blue-Eyes White Dragon. Some parts of the card maybe straight forward, others not so much. Some are a bit different however, but we’ll get into that in a little bit.
This is not a guide teaching how to play the game itself! There are many other guides out there that already do this, including the official Rulebook which I heavily emphasis you give a read in addition to this guide.Įvery card universally has the same structure. This is a comprehensive guide that breaks down every type of new and old card and explains how they are summoned and what their use case is for! This also includes a breakdown of the current field layout as of Master Rules 4-5!