Intoduction to Yu-Gi-Oh!

Yu-Gi-Oh! is a popular trading card game that involves using different monsters, spells, and traps to defeat your opponent in a duel. The name Yu-Gi-Oh! comes from the Japanese word "Yūgiō" meaning "Game King" or "King of Games". First originating in 1996, Yu-Gi-Oh! was originally a manga series created by Kazuki Takahashi in which the protagonist, Yugi Mutou, would transform into his alternate self, known as Dark Yugi, and would fight off different villans using a viarity of different games. While at first the manga focused on using many different games for the protaginst to play, it eventually focused on the game of Duel Monster which would later become the inspiration for the real world game of Yu-Gi-Oh!

Since the realse of the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga, there have been many sequals and spinoffs including 10 different mangas and 9 different anime. Because of the popularity of the original Yu-Gi-Oh! manga and anime, in 1999 the company Konami release the first set of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards in Japan. Latter on, as Yu-Gi-Oh! became more popular in the west, the company Upper Deck Entertainment released the first english prining of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards in the U.S. in 2002. From there the game of Yu-Gi-Oh! split into the OCG (Offical Card Game), which is used in most of Asia, and the TCG (Trading Card Game), which is used in the rest of the world. While these two forms of the game have the same rules and cards, they differe in the language of the cards and which cards are allowed to be played in offical games.

To play Yu-Gi-Oh! you need first assemble a deck of 40-60 cards. In your deck you should have an arangement of different monster, spell, and trap cards. The amount of monsters, spells, and/or trap cards that you would want to use depends on the archetype that you're playing. In Yu-Gi-Oh!, decks are build around an archetype which is a collection of cards that share a common string in their Japanese name and have similar effects. What each archetype does determines what types of cards you would want to put into your deck, as you would want cards that can support the main theme of the archetype and make up for its weaknesses. You might also want to assemble an extra deck which is a collection of 1-15 cards that act as a second deck of monsters with special summoning conditions. With a deck, and potentially and extra deck, assembed all you need to do is find another player and you can have a duel, duels are what we call our matches in Yu-Gi-Oh! There are 6 phases in a turn of Yu-Gi-Oh!: the draw phase where you draw a card, the standby phase where some card effects can happen, main phase 1 where you can play your cards, the battle phase where you have monsters attack one another, main phase 2 a second main phase, and the end phase. The main objective of the duel is to lower your opponents life points from 8000 to 0 and this can be done through the types of cards you play in your deck. Most decks will rely on monsters to deal damage during the battle phase but there are also spell cards and trap cards that can do the same thing. There are even cards that have effects that can allow you to win the duel without needing to lower your oppoents life points to zero.