The Duel Masters franchise is one that I would honestly say I've been a
fan of for a long time, but I've really never dug in very deep. That may be slowly changing as it catches more and more of my attention as a decidedly
meta take on a fantasy world.
It all started with a manga more than 20 years ago. If the story I read was correct...and I'm remembering it correctly...creator Shigenobu Matsumoto was supposed to make a comic based on Magic: The Gathering. The intention was for him to tell a story set among the fantastic planes of MTG. What he delivered, though, was a tale of a young boy (Shobu) striving to become a Magic: The Gathering champion...
It wouldn't be until later in the series that the manga would lend its name to a completely new card game, clearly inspired by the mechanics and the five-color cosmology of MTG but operating as its own entity. There's definitely a sort of MTG meets Yu-Gi-Oh! aura about it, and it seems to have been a pretty smart move by Wizards of the Coast. (I realize that last statement doesn't get written very much in our hobby these days...)
I was just observing from the sidelines as the game made its way to the States and gained a reasonable amount of popularity. And when I saw that the second set was called
"Evo-Crushinators of Doom," I could tell that there might be something interestingly self-aware about the property. I would eventually pick up one of the GBA games, and Fr. Josh and I split a set of mega-discounted starter decks at Dragon Con one year. (In fact, my favorite experience with the game itself is probably the time my friend John wanted to get in a lunchtime game of MTG at Georgia State, and while I found myself without a Magic deck, I did happen to have a Duel Masters deck on me. John graciously allowed me to play the Duel Masters deck in a game of Magic...dividing combat values by 1000, of course...and it worked pretty darn well!)
While the game seems to still be going strong in Japan, it hasn't had an English release in almost 20 years. There was an attempt to reboot/reinterpret it as
Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters, but this didn't last very long. And so, in 2025, there doesn't seem to be much of a push for the IP in North America.
Thankfully, the animated series is readily available via streaming, and the property's meta bona fides really come out in these episodes. We eventually realize that as a Kaijudo Master in training (Kaijudo being "the way of the monster," the dueling that takes place between...duel masters), Shobu is actually capable of summoning creatures from their own realms into ours. Before long, Shobu and his friends make their way into these fantastic worlds (referred to as "Civilizations" and bearing great similarity to the five colors of MTG).
It's also worth noting that the English dub of the anime takes the multiversal nature of the storyline to even another level, as the characters often seem to be aware that they are characters in an animated show. And while I haven't watched a ton of it, what I've seen has been a lot of fun. It's clear that the team localizing the show for North America really enjoyed what they were doing with it, as the dialogue is often a rapid-fire series of pop culture references, fourth wall acknowledgments, nods to genre clichés, and good old dad jokes. It won't all land for everyone, but I'll admit that I have laughed out loud on more than one occasion (not full-bodied guffaws, but definitely audible chuckles...).
I really think I have to incorporate something along the lines of Duel Masters into the Monstrous Matters universe. The idea of being connected to fantastic realms via a card game is just too cool to ignore for someone like me who, gaming-wise, might be a cardflopper at heart above all else. I did write up a Card-caster class for OSR gaming
way back when in connection with the Tenkar's Landing crowdsourced hexcrawl project...so maybe I need to dust that off and see if I can work it into something that will fit into my fantasy (monstrous) heartbreaker...
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