Greetings!
I’m fairly new to Master Duel and didn’t play much Yu-Gi-Oh! in general for the past decade - you could say I’m a complete amateur.
Now, I’ve done most of the solo mode stuff to get to know some more archetypes and played the current Theme Chronicles event to the point where I got all obtainable gems with the vendread loaner deck. Luckily, the loaner was actually quite good, so I didn’t need to build a deck. (Got all gems with a 22:8 win ratio.)
After all of this, I want to dive into ranked. For the solo mode stuff I’ve used an Endymion deck, which seems to be rouge at best - and I’ve only got the bare basics for the deck anyway (pretty much no extra deck). But now I have no clue which deck to go for. I don’t know shit about the meta game and even less about the longterm viability of decks, as I don’t want to spend all my ressources on building a deck that will banned soon anyway (like, Baronne seems like something that will be banned soon). Or worse, something that is simply unfun to play.
I don’t particually enjoy stun decks and I’m not into all or nothing combo decks ending on a board full of generic boss monsters (looking at the new superheavy stuff). Is there something viable to start building, ideally with a low power version to test the strategy, before commiting to pulling/crafting all cards needed? (like, Mannadium would take all my ressources and it’s gamble if I’d like it)
I agree with the other poster that Punk is a good deck, but maybe I’m biased since it’s my favorite archetype. It can beat most decks if it goes first, but has trouble when going second.
A good budget option is just buying 3 Ninja structure decks since they have all the cards for a full deck and can get you all the way to Diamond (further if you grind long enough). Here’s an example of a list that got to Master 1.
UR hand-traps like Maxx “C”, Ash Blossom, Imperm, etc. are used in most decks so you’ll probably want to craft them eventually, but they can just be replaced by more Ninja cards or other generic cards you own. The Only extra deck card you might want to craft is Borrelsword Dragon since there’s a cool OTK line you can do with it & Cross-Sheep, but you hardly use any extra deck cards besides the fusions and the link Ninja, which are all in the structure deck.