With less than a month until the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG World Championships on 7-8 September 2024, the results of the qualifiers are now in the books. The identities of all 27 players who’ve punched their tickets to Seattle for a chance to claim the world title are now known.

Certain deck archetypes have clearly separated themselves from the pack and are expected to be among the leading decks at Worlds. The results of the recent qualifiers held in June and July give a better picture of what these archetypes are as well as the current state of the metagame.

Heading into Worlds, these are the decks most likely to make a major impact at the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG’s showpiece event:

Snake-Eye

This is clearly the archetype on top of the meta at the moment. Of the nine regional qualifiers, four were won by a player using a deck making use of a variant of this deck archetype: North America, Central America, China, and Oceania. Snake-Eye decks were far and away the most used across all the qualifiers around the world. Notably, the winners of the North America and China qualifiers both used Snake-Eye decks that incorporated Fiendsmith cards. Fiendsmith Snake-Eye decks are at the moment the predominant variant of this deck.

Once Rage of the Abyss is launched worldwide in October, Snake-Eye decks could become even stronger. This is because it’s been found that Azamina cards—a card archetype newly introduced in Rage of the Abyss—are great fits in just about any Snake-Eyes deck. Azamina cards amplify the deck’s impressive flexibility and adaptability and, being new cards, will likely be unaffected by card bans and restrictions for quite some to come.

Tenpai Dragon

This hyper-efficient beatdown deck saw its fair share of success during Worlds qualifiers, coming out on top in the European qualifier and having a strong presence in the top 64 of each region’s respective qualifier. The deck has been most prominent in Latin America; it was only second in usage rate behind Snake-Eye decks in the Central and South America qualifiers while a player using this deck won Nationals in four different Latin American countries.

The Tenpai Dragon deck has bounced back strongly from recent card bans and restrictions to re-establish its place at the top of the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG meta. A versatile deck full of counterplay options, one of its advantages which very few other decks possess is the fact that in many scenarios, going second with this deck is more advantageous than going first.

Yubel

Like the Snake-Eye deck, this deck pairs well with many Fiendsmith cards; decks which have incorporated Fiendsmith cards are the leading decks of this archetype in the current meta. A Fiendsmith Yubel deck user won the Asia-Pacific qualifier; that variant as well as other Yubel decks were among those most likely to make deep qualifier runs, sometimes ending in their users making it to Worlds.

This control deck is known for its stability that makes use of multiple search methods as well as counterplay options for opposing monster-centric decks. Further benefiting this deck is the fact that many of the most recent card bans and restrictions favor Fiend-type monsters—something which this deck has in abundance.

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