EVERY Yugioh Character Ranked Worst To Best! [Duel Monsters Tier List] 

After watching some other Tier List Videos by creators like Swagkage, I thought I'd try my hand at Creating & Ranking All 100 Duelists From The Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters Anime. If you would like to give this Tier List a try I have left a link for you to give it a go and submit it back to me on Twitter if you fancy. The Tier List: bit.ly/3YL37gv Send Your Rankings Here: twitter.com/TGSAnime

I hope you realise, Sam, you are going to have to and will be expected to do this for every series now - also love how the entire top tiers are just multiples of the main characters.

Some MINOR corrections. Joey is officially 2nd place in duelist kingdom. Not 3rd. Pegasus wasn't an actual participant in the tourney. And then Joey is officially 4th in Battle City. He loses the Battle for the Bronze. That goes to Kaiba

23:09 Tea being forced in a life and death situation based solely on her knowledge as a spectator is hilarious

About the only issue I have with this list is Odion's placement. Despite basically all of Marik's henchmen, and Marik himself, cheating, they all still lost. Odion played a fair duel, devastated Joey so hard he came within a hair of surrendering, and would have won easily if it wasn't for Marik forcing him to summon the fake Ra. He definitely deserved to be higher up, and I feel he just got dismissed. The only reason Joey won is plot armor, plain and simple, and Odion got robbed of both his rightful victory and a higher tier on this list.

Tea has a perfect W/L ratio with ZERO defeats, she deserves a tier of her own lol

Dark side of dimension Yami yugi: -Show up for 1 min -Beat the final boss in 1 turn -refuses to elaborate further -leave truly an sss+ character

You forget how much season 1 Yugi contributed to the Pegasus duel. Not only did he show massively imported conviction and emotional strength during the duel but he was the one setting up a good deal of the important plays and strategies to overcome the advantage the millennium eye gave Pegasus. The mind shuffle technique was his proposal, after-all and they would hace lost without it. He also was able to not only hold using own in plays separated by the Pharoah and synergies with the Pharoah's moves but even set the Pharoah up for sucess with his own. Yugi showed MASSIVE improvement by the end of this final duel for the season. He was still lesser than the pharaoh but this was a good glimpse of the effects the partnership was having on him.

Joey dueled twice in season 5 during that tournament at the start, and he actually had a real good play during his duel with Grandpa. Grandpa had a card that came back while he had a field spell up and Joey had Giant Trunade plus Premature Burial. So what he did was use Burial to revive Gilford, bounce all spells with Trunade, then use Burial again to revive Goblin Attack Force, crashed Gilford into the monster for mutual destruction then attacked direct with Goblin for game Not only was that a smart play it meant Joey knew the rulings of Burial returning to the hand which most duelist likely didn’t

About Strings - The idea of Yugi's "strategy" was to trap Strings. He was not drawing until he decked out because "haha Slifer gets stronger", it was because Slifer's auto-attack effect forced him to keep to doing it.

I think you underestimated Odion and overestimated Noah. Odion qualified for the Battle City finals twice over (he got the cards for Marik) then should have defeated Joey. Noah on the other hand needed use the Deck Master system, used shenanigans and doesn't appear to be the best at Deck building given his inconsistent strategy. Rafael should have gotten more credit for his insane draws (nearly on the level of Atem). No one playing Guardians should be able to do as well as he did.

I think the most accurate thing in this video was him saying “ he was doing pretty good, but he was playing against yugi”

The only change id make is promoting Paradox up to S tier probably somewhere next to Dartz. One thing to note is that not only was he going up against THREE godly protags (vaguely battle city Atem, post GX Jaden, final season Yusei) but he ALSO had a massive disadvantage with starting out with only 5 cards in comparison to their combined 15. He still managed to keep up very well with them. Honestly good on him XD

I love to see Season 5 Bakura in S-Tier. I feel like he gets easily overlooked by most people. I agree with most things on the list. Some things I would personally change a bit up would be Dartz to the bottom of SS-Tier. His Deck and Duel was just pure insanity. I would also put Ishizu, Marik, Paradox and Millennium Ring Diva on S-Tier with Pegasus, Noah and Rishid/Odion at the top of A-Tier. I feel like Rishid gets a bit underrated. But thats of course just my opinion. All in all an interesting and cool list!

I think Marik should've been split into regular Marika and yami Marik. Regular one didn't know the full potential of Ra, and thanks to that his plan to use Ra was to summon it on the field, while Yami Marik, who knew about Ra's full powers, had a strategy summon it from the grave, and he even changed some cards from regular Marik's deck.

Twist, Solomon is actually one of the best duelists so he purposefully makes unreasonably trash decks just to be able to keep increasing his power level like Goku training with weighted clothes. He thrives on the challenge of making trash decks seem almost viable

Joey had two duels in season 5 during the grand championship arc, he beat Yugi’s grandpa and then he lost to the Zigfried. So he went 1-1 there

I find it so funny how when sam talks about season 4 he completely forgets the kc grand prix arc just after waking the dragon's lol, like the video lets get that gx video

Little did we know, Rick with his full dragon deck would go on to work for Konami and eventually design the Dragon Ruler cards

A couple things that are notable about Bakura In the Manga when he duels marik he only loses due to Marik top decking monster reborn Also in the Manga only he defeats Joey in a very quick duel inside the Millenium World

The KC Grand Championship is part of season 5 as filler. So Joey actually does duel. He duels Solomon and Ziegfried. It didn’t seem like Joey’s desk changed much since waking the dragons, since the KC Grand Championships takes place immediately after.

i think the SS and S tier totally makes sense. Even in canon Pegasus noted that Yugi (possibly referring to both Yugi and Atem), Seto and Joey were top three in his opinion in GX (which would watch the end of Yugioh DM). so it makes sense the various versions of the three of them would be most of SS and S-tiers.

Already excited for the GX list Also, if I could impose a suggestion, you should do these in chronological order. Maybe not the best idea to cover yugi and Kaiba all the way through the series first, content wise.

If you really want a great showcase of Joey as a duelist, read Yu-Gi-Oh! R! He gets some amazing matches in, including a rematch with someone you'd never expect to see. He also _takes out_ one of the God Card equivalents on his own *_and wins._* If you wanted to see Joey do a 100% run of his Battle City bouts, this is the series for you.

Joey is interesting because he only seems to be a Great duelist when the moment calls for it. His luck aside his will to win when he needs to seems to be the biggest reason he’s really Great at dueling WHEN he’s great at dueling which isn’t all the time.

Season 1 Yugi is the most OP duelist of all time. He was able to come up with hes own rules AGAINST THE CREATOR OF THE GAME! How do you do that?!

I wonder what would've happened if the first thing Mai did, once she stole Ra, was to rip the god card in apart? I'd love to have seen Marik's reaction xD

Atem had a great development from season one to the last season and that goes for the other characters like Joey, Seto but in my opinion Atem had a massive change out of the other characters. He went from dueling with a certain style to almost giving into darkness but then managed to change his ways again with help from his friends

Just gonna say it Kaiba only lost to people wit bs magical items. I would be interested to see how he would duel if he ever got the rod.

I just realized Tea and Serenity are the only ones here who are technically undefeated.

Note that Yugi’s timeline of events takes place over the course of roughly 3 years. The show would make you believe that these events happen over the course of weeks back to back to back, but not so. I would say at least a few months pass between the first virtual world arc and Battle City. And after Battle City, weeks pass before the Pyramid of Light events. I would say BBT takes place after Battle City Finals, but before Pyramid of Light. Either that or it takes place days before the Battle City Tournament officially Begins as there’s a small time jump between Serenity’s surgery and when she can take the bandages off, and we know Yugi/Yami has the BC Duel Disk during BBT, so it would explain the lack of God Cards. That or Yami never needed to summon them and it takes place after BC finals and before Pyramid of Light. Because it also features Pegasus, who’s recovered from losing his Millennium Eye but there’s no mention of Yugi’s friends, who were around for Pyramid of Light but not BBT. That’s my best guess at least. There’s also Yugi vs Jaden, which takes place after Orichalcos, but before Grand Championship or after Grand Championship and before the trip to Egypt. Remember, there are small time jumps between certain arcs, filler or otherwise. There has to be, otherwise it’s a huge time jump to Dark Side of Dimensions since they’re talking graduation and college and such. Thoughts?

People always sleep on Yugi (non Atem). He's a good duelist for that time period and the cards available at his disposal. Atem was basically just the confidence and self esteem, which Yugi had to grow into. I have to give you kudos for actually pretty much nailing his ranking (imo). It isn't a big thing but it is slightly annoying that of all the protagonists, he seems to not get enough credit.

Don’t know if you realize this, but Odion had Joey season 2/3 beat, Joey won the duel because Marik forced Odion to play the fake Ra card and that caused the thunderstorm. Also fun fact, Magnum was 1 duel away from the battle city finals, had he beaten Mai, he’d have been in so he won 6 locater cards so he should theoretically be higher than each duelist who competed in battle city and lost.

You like Rex more cause he’s not actually a bad guy until s4 and even then he has an actual reason beyond pure revenge or power. Up till then he’s just got some attitude, but could have been a better character like a really knock off of kaibas character arc

Kaiba DSOD did a Destiny Draw and succesfully call a "forever gone" Obelisk The Tormentor, that alone was just insane. I'd put him above S5 Yugi definitely.

A lot of other people have said what I originally wanted to regarding some of the other characters, so I won't repeat too much, but I did want to chip in and confirm that yes, it's explicitly stated Bandit Keith did only start cheating after Pegasus humiliated him on national US television. Keith became a laughingstock among the DM community and was doing anything and everything to both get his prestige back and get revenge on Pegasus.

This was awesome! Saying yugi didn’t take Mai seriously in their duelist kingdom Duel made me crack up. My guy was going through a mental breakdown after almost killing kaiba lol

This is awesome! I would love to watch this type of video for the other Yugioh series as well!

DSOD duels were really well put together. And Yugi does kind inhabit a transcendent level of dueling he just READS his opponents and pulls off an infinite loop combo.

Great video! The effort to do this is why you’re one of my favorite RU-vidrs. You did a good job on the rankings too. Minus a few character placements, I would of ranked them like this too. Hope you do rankings for the other series

The fact that you put Tèa in above Mai is really funny to me. I love it

Honestly I love every yugioh DM video you upload and I get giddy whenever I see a new one!

The problem with early Mai is that we don't really ever see her win, except in the Tea duel that she threw. She beat Rex offscreen, but it was when she was cheating. We know she beat other duelist offscreen before facing Joey but was also till cheating. After she started to go straight, she beat a bunch of duelist offscreen as well, but we don't know how many or what skill level they were. There is clearly some credit to her claim she is a good duelist beyond her parlor tricks and she proves this with knowlage of strategies beyond a good deal of other duelist at the time. She is very much a foil counterpart of bandit kieth. They both start off gebuinly competent duelist who still rely on cheating despite this. Keith however, has prestige but seeks vengeance using others as his pawns. Mai simply seeks prestige and feels the only way is to do so at first is independently. In kieths first duel, he uses Bones to do his dirty work against Joey but loses and decides he must go independent after that point. Mai first duels and loses to Joey on her own so does a reverse of Kieth and uses Rex as her stooge to get vengeance on Joey. Kieth only leans harder into his cheating by the semi-finals where Mai has learned to rely entirely on her own skills. Had Kieth not been conveniently disqualified so only the main characters plots needed to be focused on, he and Mia would ahvevhad to duel for third place in the Duel Kindom Tourney. Since Kieth was caught cheating but Mai lost in a legitimate duel, she rose above him and got the third place automatically (remember that Yugi came in first, Joey second and the Pegasus duel was a prize after the tournament, not a part of it.) The first season was less about Mai's Dueling skill/growth and more about her perosnal character growth that set her past Bandit Kieth as a duelist. Had she not had her interactions with the main cast and taken a positive from it, she would have also likly used her cheating methods at the semi-finals, gotten caught by Pegasus and ejected from the tourney. Since this character arch was really more the focus and everything on her actual skillset outside her duel with Yugi and Tea is implied, it is hard to Guage her. It's clear her duel with Tea was never serious despite her claims, and Tea was a newbie, so you can't use that. Her duel with Yugi was impressive, but it also was a single duel, which you can't truly use to estimate the general capabilities of someone.

Enjoyed the video a lot,but I'm baffled how no one is giving Battle City Bakura any credit. He came closer than anyone to beating Atem and had a very unique and interesting deck. Honestly I hardly remember any characters giving Atem such a hard time (except for Dartz, Raphael who are not canon and Kaiba ofc) Also it is heavily implied he lost to Marik because original Marik was not well informed about Ra's Special Abilities and came up with a faulty strategy.

This is a great video idea and love the work you are pointing in. Good Yu-Gi-Oh content

Alister and Ziegfried are underrated imo. Alister used a mixed Pegasus Toon/his own deck in his first duel against Kaiba, managed to steal two of Kaiba's Blue Eyes with his Gorlag and temporarily turn the duel around in his favor after throwing off his Pegasus disguise. He even managed to force a draw after Kaiba magically got and used the "Fang of Critias". He even performed pretty well in their second duel using a slightly underpowered deck. On the other hand, Ziegfried beat both Weavil and Rex in one turn, beat Joey in a straight up legit duel, and went toe to toe with Kaiba until of course, the "3 Blue Eyes" plot armor( + Chaos Emperor Dragon) kicks in.

Absolutely loved this tier list. I would love to see you do the other series if you decide to do them.

Seeing this for Zexal would be a treat, the different versions of Yuma are gonna be all over the tier list lmao.

This was a fun video! I'd love to see you do this again for GX and 5D's and so on

I would put Raphael at high S tier or even low SS tier. He is insanely good duelist and the only one to beat yami. Even in the second duel he got him down to 10 LP and only lost because he didn’t attack queens knight (so plot pretty much).

If you didn't give Joey S tier I would have cried. And thank you so much for remarking Pegasus scene in GX. Everyone seems to forget that. Plus Joey has one of the best arcs through every Yu-gi-oh series, and by all right should have had the winged dragon of ra. I would have been happy with that plot twist, not to take away from yugis main story buy imagine if Joey became the third God card wielder and we got to see him really put Kaiba on the ropes, gain his respect as a true duelist who could wield a God, then watch yugi fight Kaiba in the end against both gods. Still could keep Kaiba skill over Joey valid, Yugi would still have a big reason to win the gods from Kaiba for his memories, and it would complete Joey's ultimate arc of going from one of the worst duelist to one of the greatest in such a short a time. Sorry for the rant but that's the end of battle city I would have loved to see. And the plot twist would have blown everyone away with Joey fainting and taking the win against battle city's main antagonist causing so much pain to everyone,, seeing Kaiba shit a brick 😂😂 and Yugi being elated with joy that Joey's soul wasn't taken by a God.

Was very interesting, definitely do one for GX !! I’d say dartz would be above yugi (POL) and rafael above joey (S4) maybe 🤔

The biggest problem with Joey is that he relies so much on luck that if he wasn't a main character you know he would have lost damn near every duel. Especially in battle city. He had no business getting 4th

Commenting during the joeys so you might answer by the end but I love this video format and would love to see you do this for the rest of the yugiohs (or at least through vrains since sevens is so different) and if so it'd be interesting to see if you do separate tier lists or gradually make a massive combined one

That feeling when you think you'll see Tea in SS tier. Not cause she'll beat Atem in a duel but cause they'll surrender and give her the win.

I think you could have included non-possessed Marik. Based on how he played using Strings and Bandit Keith against Yugi. Also when he advised Bakura in the duel against yami Marik

Yeah I’d like a GX Tier list please. Although there are so many one off characters in that series.

This video was awesome Sam and the amount of editing is crazy kudos. I hate being this commenter too but for season 5 there was the Grand Prix were Joey Kaiba and Yugi dueled

You are such a Chad man. I know those videos take long to be recorded but we would love to see Tierlists on the other series as well

Was right there doing this whole tier list with you, and could preemptively give very similar if not the same rankings

Zigfried is the European National Champion, OTKed Weevil and Rex at the same time, beat S5 Joey quite easily and would've beaten him sooner if Joey Luck was not so high and was ok against S5 Kaiba so I don't know why he is below S5 Joey since his deck is also pretty nutty.

This was sooo fun and interesting. Hope you keep doing more of these

Odion should definitely be higher imo. He would have won against Joey completely clean if Marik didn’t force him to play Ra. Also Marik gave him the real Ra he would have won too. Odion knew the god card wouldn’t let him play it but Marik ordered him.

it also stated that Yugi would have lost to marik if kaiba didnt gave him Fiend Sanctuary. and the manga version stated the odds of yugi victory with or without the card are very low. even Seto would only have a 13% chance of victory when going up against Ra

Can't wait for the GX one! Was a more fun watch here, then I first thought!

I really enjoyed this video. You think we could get a dual analysis video of Tea vs. Krump as that's truly Teas one good duel

Hi TGS Anime I love this and I hope you have a good day and you are awesome

Love the list! I think S5 Bakura was well placed especially after his duel with Yugi where Yugi only won cause of exactly Gandora. Bakura is also debatably the least reliant on his item though he does like using bakura as a human shield but id say compared to marik, yugi, ishizu, and pegasus he isnt nearly as bad. In the case of Marik he’s funky cause he can duel pretty solid but he screws around too much and can rely on the Ra technicality which especially in the Mai and Bakura duels as that isnt a skill its just him being able to either read a dead language or basically meta game over the opponent.

POINT OF ORDER! Joey came in SECOND in Duelist Kingdom, as the duel with Pegasus was Yugi's victory prize.

I think you placed Yami (S5) and Yugi (S5) correctly at first. Yami vs anyone but Yugi will do better than Yugi would, imo. Yugi knows Yami so well that he was able to perform so well against him.

i dont know what that was so entertaining but it really was, great vid (also s4 joey should definitely be in S and above s4 mai because he lost the duel because he was fatigued from the seal)

Damn this video coming in clutch cause I'm bored out of my mind at work. Now you have to do this for every series right? 😂

I suggest doing this for the other serieses as well!

Imagine a tier list with every single character from every yugioh. That would be like a 7 hour video

I've always thought about stuff like this mostly because power scaling yugioh is not really talked about I would say this list in generally is just weird because season 1 yugioh was just a completely different game like comparing monopoly to magic the gathering

15:03 i love the commentary where you admit it weird you want to classify Yugi Season 5 as S not SS despite him beating Atem lol.

Legit hoping you do more of this on the other series!

Overall pretty good tierlist, I have little complaints for some duelists deserving lower tiers, but for most I have similar or the same opinion as you. Great job!

Its okay to see DSOD Kaiba being below S5 Pharaoh. Cuz you forgot to mention that Kaiba's been obsessed in dueling Pharaoh that he always trains with a simulation of Pharoah but says that a simulation will never come close to the real deal.

23:40 Man can you imagine Tea showing up in a Mini-Arc as a Teacher at Duelist academy where she'd whoop someone's a** with a really cool deck of her own? Now THAT would have been cool.

Great vid 😊👍

Sam, I'd have to disagree with you between S2/S3 Joey and S4 Joey. They should be switched. I'll explain why (it'll be long though) Battle City Joey managed insane feats that very few if any could pull off. 1) He managed to withstand an insanely powerful (If not the most powerful) attack from Ra, the *strongest* Egyptian God card and managed to stand (albeit briefly but still) after that. 2) If it wasn't for the stupid "the main character always has to be the only one to defeat the main villian" trope, he would have defeated Marik, the main villian. 3) During the unseen duel between Joey and Yugi after Battle City, if the rules were solely "you win, you get Red Eyes back, if you lose, you don't" and it wasn't where Yugi gave back Red Eyes because they were friends or Yugi was impressed by Joey's skills or some bs, Joey HAD to defeat Yugi because Joey had Red Eyes during the Waking the Dragon arc. Anyone beating Yami/Yugi is a feat that should at the very least put the in the conversation of S tier or above. 4) During Joey and Kaiba's duel during Battle City (for 3rd place) even with his deck destroyed by Crush Card Virus, he was able to hold his own against Kaiba. Imagine if his deck was fully intact. He would have done better or MAYBE even defeated Kaiba. (Side note: Kaiba could have beat Yami during their duel if it wasn't for the "Flute of Summoning Dragon" bs Yami pulled). Joey holding his own or maybe even winning against someone who would have defeated the Pharoah if it wasn't for cheating is too impressive. 5) This doesn't have anything to do with his dueling ability but I think it's too important to skip. During his duel with Yami/Yugi when he was possessed by Marik, he was able to break free of mind control from the Millennium Rod, one of the Millennium items, the strongest items in all of Yugioh. That takes some INSANE mental strength. Now, during Waking the Dragon arc, he duels Valon and Mai, two (maybe above) average duelists. He doesn't even duel Dartz or stronger duelists like Raphael or Kaiba. His feats in the season is NOWHERE near plentiful or impressive as Battle City. If I missed anything, let me know. But yeah, those two placements should be switched.

Yess bro, do this for all series

One thing I love about S1 Yugi is jis ingenuity of the mind switch strategy to stop his thoughts being seen by Pegasus.

I would love to see a tier list for all of the series from you

Awesome ranking TGS

That's really fun, definitively want to see you doing it for GX too. But narrow it down a little, I don't think a version of a character needs to be there if it didn't dueled at all.

@TGSanime I just wanted to jogg your memorys. Joey became fourth place in the battlecity tournament. The third place was Kaiba. They had a duel for bronce and joey lost.

Pyramid of Light take places after Season 3 and before Season 4. In Season 4, Tristain did say the last time they saw him, he was less weird.

Yes, more of this please! (Also why in the name of gods is paradox so low he literally took on three protagonists at once and pushed them to the limit)

On Rebecca "She's the only person in the Yugioh anime to learn the card game." LOVE the shade! Hahaha

Can you please do a series on it with gx 5ds and the rest I know I am asking alot but plz 🙏 plus amazing video as always ❤❤

I'm kind of surprised that you didn't include Mokuba, since he dueled in the anime. That would have been your 64 right there.

A great list, except for a few of them. First off, as many have mentioned, Odion should have placed higher. Second, at some points during the video, you mentioned Kaiba and Joey not dueling at all during the season 5, which does contain the filler Grand Championship arc, where they both went against Sigfried, and Joey has even dueled Grandpa, who could have also placed higher, as it was established that he was sort of a game master during his prime. We just didn't have many opportunities to see him duel.

Damn, rapid fire TGSA content!

I think Atem at the end is still the greatest duelist of all time. Yugi is very powerful, but I think even though he won that duel, I think Atem was still more powerful.

About the bonds beyond time yugi, I think that's the yugi from before battle city started since he didn't have the God cards and pegasus was promoting new cards before the tournament (or at least i think he was doing that. Been a long time so cant remember the deals of the PR). It would make the most sense, I think.

Now this is going to be a good video!!

Even though I’m in agreement with your overall placement of the Duel Computer, if we’re only taking the S2 Duel into consideration it would’ve beaten Kaiba had it not been for his “Fusion monsters can’t attack the same turn” stipulation. Granted, it was more or less a showcase for Obelisk’s introduction and there were there fair share of misplays, but with how advanced it was in DSoD and made Kaiba sweat a bit with modern rules is an impressive feat.

Oh boy I can't wait until you get to the newer series like vrains and sevens