Posted in: Card Games, Collectibles, Events, Games, Pop Culture, Tabletop, Yu-Gi-Oh! | Tagged: Lorenzo Muselli, paris, Yuna Dicks

A Johnston At The Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championships 2025 In Paris

Toby Johnston reports back from the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championships 2025 in Paris, France with a full match report.

I couldn't go to the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championships 2025 in Paris. But that's okay, because my nephew, and keen Yu-Gi-Oh! player, Toby Johnston could go instead… and he reports back!

At the end of August, KONAMI gave me the opportunity to attend the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championships 2025 in Paris. This event celebrated the franchise's history, with an artistic collection at the historic Carnavalet museum, and its competitive future, as we saw Champions crowned in four separate categories.

In Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links, the long-standing mobile game, Duelists competed in Speed Duels, a rapid-style version of the game with characters from the anime, as well as Rush Duels, an even quicker take, allowing Duelists to refill their hands each turn and Summon as much as they like.

We also saw Master Duel's third appearance at Worlds, the online simulator released in 2022, reprising its 3v3 team-based competition, and of course, the physical Trading Card Game (TCG), which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.

On Thursday, I met with some of the competitors in the TCG event, Yuna Dicks and Lorenzo Muselli, and discussed expectations — it seemed that both Duelists expected the recent archetypes introduced in Justice Hunters (Yummy, Dracotail and K9) to make a big showing, alongside possible older contenders in the Lunalight and Maliss strategies. Both of them expressed excitement about the format, saying that the current format thankfully didn't have decks trying to be "as unfair as possible", due to the lack of the Mitsurugi cards which are currently not legal in the Official Card Game (OCG) regions, which typically enable a Ryzeal strategy to lock the opponent out of the game with cards like Archnemeses Protos and Harpie's Feather Storm.

Once we got to Friday, the event commenced in full force behind closed doors, as Master Duelists, Speed Duelists and Rush Duelists clashed in the Swiss Stages, and we found our Rush Duel Finalists, Yume Hara Sensei from Japan, and KiryuRyo from Oceania, and Speed Duel Finalists, snyffus from Europe and Kama3 from Asia, respectively.

The Master Duel event saw the dethroning of both returning World Champion teams from 2023 and 2024, snipehunters and Team 7, as well as the prolific Master Duel player Tasuku's team, Dream's Future. Continuing in their place were Teams Ragnarok, Brotdose, Chaiba Corp and Fala Galera, a fully Western Top 4 for the first time.

On Friday evening, we were invited to a Yu-Gi-Oh!– themed art exhibition at the Carnavalet Museum (which is still open until September 7th!), highlighting the incredible aesthetic dimension of the card game. On display were this year's World Championships prize cards, as well as portraits of prominent Yu-Gi-Oh! pieces of art, such as Incredible Ecclesia, the Virtuous, and the legendary Exodia the Forbidden One.

We were also given previews of upcoming Yu-Gi-Oh! collaborations, including the Yu-Gi-Oh! x FINE CHAOS clothing line, the NIKE x Yu-Gi-Oh! Joey Wheeler-inspired NIKE Air Max 95 QS YGO, and a Yu-Gi-Oh! crossover with KONAMI brand eFootball™.

On Saturday, the doors were opened to the general public, and we saw an inspiring opening ceremony to welcome Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG players to competition. As the Swiss Rounds kicked off, we saw Yuna begin a dominating streak, ultimately finishing 6-1 and advancing to the top cut in first place. We also saw strong performances from Tom Kleinegräber on the unexpected Lunalight strategy and Dino Spasovski just barely missing the Top 8 in 9th with a White Forest deck that took many by surprise.

While this was going on, however, we saw the digital Finals conclude, with Yume Hara Sensei defeating KiryuRyo in Rush Duel using his Voidvelgr and Baseball decks, and Snyffus coming back from a 2-1 deficit to clinch the Speed Duel finals 3-2 in a Shaddoll mirror match. In the Master Duel event, Teams Ragnarok and Chaiba Corp defeated their regional rivals, mirroring snipehunters and Team 7's EU vs NA clash in the finals of the past two years. The teams were evenly matched, taking the Duels one-by-one to a 4-4 tie, leaving popular content creators PakTCG and N3shTCG to battle it out for the title, a battle from which N3sh brought Team Ragnarok to victory through an aptly named Evenly Matched, wiping Pak's Mementotlan board almost entirely.

After the win, I sat down with Ragnarok's N3sh, Mist and Luka for a conversation about their victory, where I got the team fired up about the controversial 'Maxx "C"', a card which defines the Master Duel format but is not legal in the TCG. Ultimately, they said, the format seemed to have a number of decks lurking below the surface which 'Maxx "C"' kept in check, and would have to be dealt with before the contentious 'hand trap' could be removed from legality (which, N3sh wanted to be clear, they did want to happen).

On Sunday, the TCG Top 8 was the main story, with Yuna unfortunately leaving in Top 8 due to an unfortunate series of events against Julien Kehon, piloting the powerful Vanquish Soul K9 deck from 8th in Swiss. For the past two years, the TCG World Champion has worked their way through Top Cut from that 8th position, and the French-American Duelist looked on a run of that very same form in front of a home crowd in Paris.

He then advanced to the Top 4, playing against Willy Flores, the North American World Championship Qualifier champion, who chose to pilot the Yummy strategy, overwhelmingly the favourite archetype to win the tournament going in, on account of a flexible game plan and a lot of resilience to opposing interaction. Despite a hard-fought game, though, Julien came out on top, displaying the power of the aptly named 'There Can Only Be One' in Game Three against Willy's primarily Beast-Type Yummy deck.

In the other semi-final, Tom Kleinegräber's Lunalight deck faced off against another unexpected Top 4 competitor, the crowd-favourite Sky Striker deck, piloted by Roselle Thorkildsen from Norway. Although she had put on a domineering performance in her Top 8 match against Isaias Estrada's K9 Crystron strategy, the poor matchup against Lunalight, and especially the unaffected 'Lunalight Liger Dancer', proved too much of a problem for Roselle's spell-slinging boardbreaker deck, and Tom moved on to the finals to clash with Julien for the top spot.

In the finals, Julien won the dice roll and went first, establishing a powerful board using 'N.As.H Knight' to establish 'C104: Umbral Horror Masquerade' which Tom couldn't break. In the second game, the two traded resources for a while, passing back and forth with little action, in no small part due to Julien's 'Dimension Shifter' slowing the pace of the game, until Tom's Lunalights came to the rescue, pushing through the notorious Quick Effect of 'K9-17 Izuna' using 'Book of Eclipse' to secure a victory. In the final game, Julien established a strong boardstate going first, as he had done in Game 1, but this time reinforced further with a 'Droll & Lock Bird' to prevent Tom from searching, which all but sealed the Championship for the Frenchman, as the crowd went wild for their victor. 

As the weekend closed, and we waved goodbye to Paris, it was announced that the next World Championships would be held in Tokyo, Japan, the home country of the series, and a tournament which many competitors seemed particularly excited for.

Toby Johnston, there, reporting for Bleeding Cool in Paris, for the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championships 2025! And thanks to Niall Kelly from Swipe Right for making it all happen!

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