White DragonWhite Dragon | Art by Billy Christian

As my moniker, Unsummoned Skull, would imply, YuGiOh! was my introduction to Collectible/Trading Card Games (TCGs). I used to play it in my morning homeroom classes, throwing whatever cards I could find into a hodgepodge deck and play with the “Duelist Kingdom” rules, which basically meant using whatever rules were seen in the anime and whatever made sense in our preteen brains.

Learning the "real" rules to the game had a bit of a learning curve, but learning a new game altogether can be like learning a new language. As someone who has played a Magic game entirely in Spanish on Bearclaymore's stream, I can attest that it helps to learn the similarities and basic language to figure out how the skillset translates.

This article will show how YuGiOh! players can use their skillset to ease into Magic, and vice-versa.

Background

I was always behind on trends, but this was the first time I was kind of close to catching on when it became popular, which is why it has stuck with me as I made the transition to Magic. Nowadays, the transition from YuGiOh! to Magic is much easier, although there’s a bit of a learning curve involved.

YuGiOh! Basics

YuGiOh! is a seemingly simple game with three major card types: Monsters, Spells, and Traps. Monsters operate a bit like creatures, but there are only five zones for them on the game board. Spells tend to operate like sorceries. Traps operate like instants, but usually need to be set face-down through your turn first.

While these basic pieces offer plenty of complexity, each new anime series brings a new summoning mechanic with it, changing the way cards are played and evaluated.

Pain Point One: Board Layout

One of the early pain points in trying to teach Magic to a YuGiOh! player is the board layout. YuGiOh! has limits to the amount of creatures that can be summoned, with only five monster card zones. From there, decks tend to build vertically, sacrificing smaller monsters to cast larger ones with the stars determining the sacrifices needed.

The stars are located in the same place as the mana cost of a Magic card.

Pain Point Two: Lands

Another pain point is the combination of deck construction and casting conditions that are caused by lands. In YuGiOh!, playing creatures is limited by the available zones and the amount of sacrifices needed. Decks are smaller because they don’t need to waste card slots on lands.

Mana costs are similar to sacrifice costs, in more ways than just the icons being in the same spots: the more mana you spend, the bigger and cooler spells you can cast, just like the more stars the monster has, the bigger and stronger it tends to be.

Bridge Point One: Signature Cards

Speaking of spells and monsters being bigger and cooler, one of the bridges between Magic and YuGiOh! is the concept of a signature card. Major characters in the YuGiOh! anime have always had signature monsters, beginning in Duelist Kingdom, with Kaiba’s Blue-Eyes White Dragon and Yugi’s Dark Magician, and continuing with the Egyptian God Cards in Battle City and the summoning mechanic du jour in subsequent series. 

Commanders and Deckmasters

In Commander, players have a signature card in the command zone, which makes it a solid format for teaching YuGiOh! players, despite what The Professor said in a recent video.

The concept of “your commander is your ace monster” is an easy one to convey, and even connects to a variant of YuGiOh! introduced in the Virtual World arc: Deckmasters.

Commander and Domain

In YuGiOh!, Deckmasters occupy a similar role to commanders: They're creatures that have a command zone ability, like eminence, and can be placed onto the battlefield if requirements are met, like having an extra card in hand.

Unlike commanders, however, if a deckmaster is destroyed, the player loses the game. While the rules are somewhat different, the Domain variant of YuGiOh is made to be played as a multiplayer format, and is a near-perfect Commander analog.

Bridge Point Two: Archetypes

Another connection between YuGiOh! and Commander, albeit more subtle, is the concept of archetypes. In YuGiOh!, most decks follow an archetype, where the monsters share titles, summoning mechanics, domains (hence the name of the Commander analog), and complementary abilities.

This is very similar to typal decks in Commander, which is one of the main reasons I started writing about exclusively typal decks here on EDHREC. 

Conclusion

As mentioned in my Bridging the Brackets article, typal decks provide an excellent bridge between Brackets, including going from Bracket Zero (or not playing) to Brackets One and Two, which are the more casual and forgiving levels of play. My hope, in writing about typal decks almost exclusively, is that new players and brewers can learn how to play and build decks where the creature type line and subsequent Scryfall search does a lot of the heavy lifting.

These are skills that can translate into building fun signature decks in a variety of games!

What card games besides Magic do you play? And what difficulties and carryovers were there?