When I came back to Yu-Gi-Oh after so many years away from the hobby, I was greeted with something almost completely unrecognizable. Turn one 20-card combos into unbreakable board states just felt… off. While I appreciate the deck-building balance of engine pieces to non-engine interaction pieces (believe it or not I think advanced is in a fairly healthy place with the prevalence of hand traps), it still feels like a different game, and not a game that is friendly to newcomers or Yu-Gi-Oh old-timers. A big departure from “The Heart of the Cards.”
So I walked away from Yu-Gi-Oh and played the other one. What I found was that I loved the casual multiplayer nature of it. But I will always love and cherish Yu-Gi-Oh and still want to play it. So I got to work creating a new format that I would come to call “Schoolyard” format. This is something I’ve been working on for over a year, and after hundreds of games and many deck revisions I’m finally confident in a system that anyone can replicate and customize to their liking.
At first it was a draft format in which each player would choose from a “pack of cards” and pass the rest until all the cards were claimed. But this was slow and disproportionately benefited the person who built the deck. So that idea was scrapped in favor of randomly assigning equal portions of the deck to each player. As an added element of fun, this was the stage at which I introduced the buff/debuff dice. And this system worked for a while, but I found that it had a tendency to brick one player. Dead cards were far too common as searchers would end up in decks of 20 cards with no viable search targets. So finally I decided to make it a shared deck and graveyard, and this is where it truly clicked.
So after about 5 months of playing this final revision of the Schoolyard deck, I can finally feel good releasing it to the world. This has been a long journey, but it’s something I care about deeply and wanted to make sure it was accessible to anyone wanting to play it. I have my decklist detailed on this site, but you can follow the guide and easily build your own out of bulk cards and add some of your old pet cards.
Happy dueling,
- James