this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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None of these look very interactive, so I’m not sure “healthy” is the right word. Diverse, sure, but a format where almost every deck is essentially a combo deck is probably not especially interesting to play (and I say this as an absolute combo degenerate).
This is true of higher power formats in general, and part of why I don't like them. Despite that, a healthy format is one where many strategies are viable, and that seems to be the case here.
Of the most represented decks, a couple are combo decks, but unless things have changed a lot since I last looked at modern decks, only around half of these listed decks are combo decks, which is a lot, but it shows that non-combo strategies are also viable and it's not just a Yugioh format.
Eh, vintage has had control and hatebear-style decks as its most prominent decks for years, with combo often being around 1/3 or less of the metagame. Legacy often has a tempo or control deck as the de facto best deck. Combo being this dominant is really only a modern thing. And while some of these decks aren’t A+B combo decks, I wouldn’t immediately consider them interactive in the way tempo or control would be.
Most of these decks are racing for their win-con, which makes them strategically similar in a way a metagame with strategies like death&taxes, hard control, tempo, and midrange wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t consider a hypothetical metagame with 50 different T3 combo decks more diverse than, say, current vintage.