Decklists Leaked During Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championships

Yu-Gi-Oh! Masters Duel became the center of controversy and debate on the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championships last weekend. The tournament started with a shock for players of the 3v3 Master Duel format, when most of their decklists appeared online in the early stages of the Swiss rounds.

The decks appeared on the MasterDuelMeta website, a resource site for those trying to improve their play in the game. It immediately ran into issues with parts of the decks. Yu-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 on Twitter in which he explained his reasoning for posting the lists. He explained, “What happens at Worlds is that (players at home, not at the event venue, go through all the replays… they make spreadsheets. And then they link the spreadsheet to a few players, just their friends… that, in my opinion, is an unfair advantage.”

His evidence for these claims was 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 he reported on the Master Duel championships, and that all this information is accessible via the Master Duel client himself.

The decklists were also compiled using the third-party app Untapped.gg. Untapped tweeted on their Yu-Gi-Oh! On September 8th they reported that they had fixed the issue that was making this possible on their end.

This situation quickly became a topic of discussion on the MasterDuelMeta website, Yu-Gi-Oh! subreddits, and X, formerly Twitter. The conversation on X took on another dimension when a player attended the World Championships, JudeuYGO, posted a comment on MasterDuelMeta expressing disgust for this kind of reporting. The comment reads in part: “You don’t care about the competitive environment, you don’t care about how your actions affect the players at the world championships. You just want to get as much money as possible.”

This comment was immediately responded to by Dkayed on his Twitch stream. After reading the comment on stream, Dkayed responded by saying, among other things, “JudeuYGO is possibly, probably, mad that his friends back home watching Worlds can’t secretly give JudeuYGO the secret techniques that no one else has… So, Judeu, I’m sorry you’re on an even playing field now.” These statements were edited out of his Twitch stream and posted to social media, quickly sparking more debate and backlash, resulting in “Dkayed” trending on X for a portion of the weekend.

Konami does not run its competitive events under “open deck” rules, so this leak could potentially constitute a violation of their tournament policies. At the time of reporting, Konami has not made any public statements regarding the incident, and there have been no reports from the individuals involved that Konami has taken action.

Despite the decklist leak, the Master Duel event at Worlds went ahead as planned through Saturday. On Sunday, the event concluded with a rematch between the teams that took first and second place in last year’s World Championship finals.