Yu-Gi-Oh is a trading card game from Konami, similar to games like Magic The Gathering and the Pokemon Trading Card Game. It's based on the fictional game "Duel Monsters", which features in the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga and anime.
It was launched in 1999, and has been popular ever since, having sold tens of billions of cards over the last two decades.
Maze of Memories is the latest booster pack, featuring 67 cards. All are foiled to some extent, with 42 Rares, 15 Super Rares, and 10 Ultra Rares. 15 cards are also available as Collector's Rare, which features a rainbow-coloured reflective pattern.
The set adds 10 brand new cards, as well as 20 imports from the OCG (The version of the game played in Asia).
The world premiere cards are all support for the Gate Guardian, a previously unloved archetype made popular in the first season of the anime. Most notably there's a new fusion monster, "Gate Guardians Combined", which is Special Summoned from your extra deck by banishing the three parts of the Gate Guardian from your hand, field, or graveyard.
It's a beast of a card, coming in at level 12 with 3750 ATKand 3400 DEF. In addition, it negates card effects, and destroys the card in question - and it can do this not once but three times per turn. When it leaves the field "because of an opponents card", you can special summon a level 11 or lower "Gate Guardian" monster from your deck or extra deck, ignoring its summoning conditions.
This is a great card that really elevates the Gate Guardian archetype - summoning a gate guardian will send the three parts to the graveyard, which you can then banish to summon Gate Guardians Combined.
If it leaves the field, you can summon a new Gate Guardian from your deck on top of that, or one of the new fusion cards - "Gate Guardian of Thunder and Wind", "Gate Guardian of Wind and Water", or "Gate Guardian of Water and Thunder".
These cards are level 9, and only require two of the components to summon. They have 2550 ATK, 2300 DEF, and have their own abilities that can be used up to twice per turn, including negating spell or traps, reducing an enemy monsters attack to zero, or adding spell/traps from your deck to your hand that mention the gate guardian components.
"Labyrinth Heavy Tank", is an additional new card, which lets you retrieve one of your banished Gate Guardian components as a continuous spell (where it can be reused by the Gate Guardian cards), and destroy a monster your opponent controls, provided you control a Labyrinth Wall.
There's "Shadow Ghoul of the Labyrinth", a card which adds a Labyrinth wall from your deck to your hand, and lets you destroy enemy monsters by banishing it, as well as an awesome spell card, "Double Attack! Wind and Thunder!!", which retrieves banished Gate Guardian components (or grabs them from your deck) as well as destroying one card on the field if you control a Gate Guardian monster.
Finally, we see the addition of "Roryoku Guardian", which halves your opponent's life points and adds the remainder to your Gate Guardian monster, and "Prey of the Jirai Gumo", a trap card that special summons as a monster and destroys a monster your opponent controls in that column.
These aren't complete explanations of the cards - just a taster of their concepts and ideas, and you'd do well to check out the complete card explanations and card list here.
The OCG imports are too lengthy to mention here, but the highlights for a lot of players will be "Red-Eyes Soul", a Red-Eyes support card that special summons a "Red-Eyes" monster from your deck, "On Your Mark, Get Set, DUEL!", which supports Synchron monsters, and "Black Luster Soldier - Legendary Swordsman"
The set's crown jewel is arguably the awesome-looking "Accel Synchro Stardust Dragon", which protects cards from card effects and summons a tuner monster from your Graveyard. It also sports some of the best card art in the game, and can be tributed to special summon a regular "Stardust Dragon".
Overall the set is incredible, adding a tonne of support for the most popular archetypes, and adding some fantastic viability to the move-loved but underrepresented Gate Guardian Archetypes. Some of the new cards will likely become immediate staples, particularly the Synchro Monsters and support.
Each of the boosters contains seven cards, and to round things off we opened 24 of them to see what the pull rates might be like for various cards.
Loot from 24 boosters
With 7 cards per pack, 24 packs totalled 168 cards. With only 67 in the set, that felt like good odds.
We pulled at least of every single World Premiere card, even managing to snag 2 "Gate Guardians Combined", and 2 "Gate Guardian of Thunder and Wind", both of which are Super Rare.
For the OCG Imports, we missed out on ""Black Luster Soldier - Legendary Swordsman", "Duel Academy", "Evolution End Burst", and, most devastatingly of all, "Accel Synchro Stardust Dragon". These are all Ultra Rare.
We also failed to pull "Firewall Dragon Darkfluid - Neo Tempest Terahertz", which is also Ultra Rare, but we did multiples of the Super Rare "Overlay Network" and "Number 39: Utopia Rising".
47 of our cards were OCG Imports, and 24 were World Premier cards.
Of the remaining reprints, we missed "Superancient Deepsea King Coelacanth" (Super Rare), "Guardian Chimera" (Ultra Rare) "Baronne de Fleur" (Ultra Rare), "Teardrop the Rikka Queen" (Ultra Rare) "Burial from a Different Dimension" (Rare) and "Solemn Judgment" (Ultra Rare).
This means out of the 67 cards, we managed to get at least one of 57 of them, and actually got up to 4 of many of the Rares.
We didn't get a single Collector's Rare, and we managed 2 Ultra Rares ("Wind-Up Kitten" and "Wake Up Your Elemental HERO"), and 22 Super Rares.
This comes out at about 13% Super Rares and 1.2% Ultra Rares, or 1 in 7 (1 per pack) and 1 in 84 Ultra Rares (1 in 12 packs). The Collectors Rares are typically rumoured to be around 1 in 50 packs, so we probably didn't have enough packs to be sour about not getting one!
Conclusion and Impressions
The pull rates are fairly standard looking, but the main point to take away is that there is a good spread of cards - for most of the rares that we did get, we got 3 or 4 of each. Decks tend to run 2 or 3 of the majority of cards they use, so you're well covered off here for all but the rarest ones.
In addition, the prints are fantastic - we didn't find any that were especially off-centre, with the Ultra Rares actually having print quality akin to the older style, which is also in fact still the style they use in America with slightly darker prints and thicker card.
They also offer new support for most popular archetypes, and even brings "Gate Guardian" decks into contention, as well as adding a few potentially new staples, and reprints for already popular cards.
To top it all off, the artwork is fantastic - making it an awesome choice for collectors and competitive players alike.
Yu-Gi-Oh Maze of Memories is available now, with boxes of 24 boosters priced at around £69.95
