Maximum Gold El Dorado is set to come out later this month on the 18th! Thanks to the help of sponsored Yugitubers, we got to figure out the entire setlist early. At a quick glance, it's looking to be one of the best reprint sets we've had to date! Not perfect as there are some stinkers, but they're few and far between compared to most products. Let's take a look and see just how good the set is!
Feel free to check out the entire setlist here!
Reprinted Favorites
Meluseek, Prank-Kids Place, and Doodle have been hiking up in terms of cost for a while now and gatekept some people from getting their hands on them. As for the Legendary Duelist stuff, cards like Urgent Schedule and Ancient Gear Fusion were also reaching abhorrent prices.
This was even after the reprints both in LDS1 and LDS2 due to the ratios of getting them! Perhaps now both casual and semi-competitive players alike can find some breathing room with these gold printings.
The Gold Rare is also a decent rarity to have them in too, so that's a win-win! Definitely a good idea to pick these up early if you're planning to play any of them. There may also be hope that Pranks and Dinos can get unhit in the future due to these, but only time will tell!
DBP Fans Rejoice!
The good news doesn't stop there, as we have some great reprints from a bunch of the Deckbuilding Pack sets in El Dorado! Hospitality, Alembertian, and Snow were getting costly as their sets haven't exactly aged well. This gives players a good way to get them for cheap in a decent rarity.
No more shelling out $40 apiece for the Math man himself, or $40 a playset as an entry point to play Weather Painters or for your Hospitalities! Great stuff all around, a lot better than just getting meme fillers for your Gold Rares, unlike last time.
The best of what PSY-Frames has to offer get some nice love in this set too, with a pretty nice reprint of Gamma and Lambda! Zeta and Omega are alright as well. RDA stuff is a weird choice since Duel Power already rewaved them, but it's nothing too bad.
Speaking of decks from Deckbuilding Packs, it's best we talk about the most important one in the set! It's the namesake for El Dorado, after all.
The Golden Experience
A lot of people are quite excited for this one, Eldland gets a reprint! Not only that, the entirety of the Eldlich cards from SESL didn't skip out either. This is especially good as MP21 skipped over Cursed Eldland for some reason, I guess they were saving it for this! Conquistador, Huauqero, and the Eldlixirs are present and this makes sure for once, players can actually get Eldlich for cheap!
The deck's accessibility has always been a thorn on players ever since the deck came out. From the short printings of Golden Lord to the insane spiking of Eldland and so much more, it's never been easy to build Eld. We might finally see that change once the set drops! Just make sure to pick them up early this time. The first MAGO Golden Lord rose up to a hefty $10 apiece after quite a few months.
Let's not forget that banger of an alternate art the Golden lad himself gets, one of the best Konami has made thus far. Feel free to look it up for yourself, it's a sight to behold.
Goodstuff Galore!
Another upside that El Dorado has over its predecessor; actually decent Gold Rares! The first Maximum Gold had the unfortunate downside of having a lot of horrid pack filler cards. There's a lot of incredible reprints that fit the bill for a wide variety of decks here, let's go over them!
Mining is a great staple for most if not all Cyberse decks out there, and having it at an affordable price and rarity is nice. Dragon Link appreciates Striker, the Baby Chaos Dragons, and Dragunity Knight - Romulus out of this!
The elemental Charmers are great Link options that go in and out of the meta, so having them around in case is a good thing! You can always rotate to the best one for your deck in a given format.
Decks like Virtual World enjoy the additions of Tzolkin and Ptolemy M7, PK gets to use Kagemucha Knight, a lot of decks can use Almiraj, and so on. The set just keeps on giving and giving!
For trap enthusiasts, Broken Line and Trap Trick now become a lot cheaper so it may be worth experimenting with them! Purple cards rejoice! The former is an interesting tech in heavy trap piles, while the latter lets you toolbox to your arsenal. Don't count out Summon Limit either!
The Glorious Top-End
Last but not the least, the impressive Premium Gold Rare lineup that El Dorado has to offer! Accesscode Talker absolutely takes the cake, finally receiving a well-deserved reprint. The card is one of the best Link-4s at the moment and is a staple of competitive play. Predaplant Verte Anaconda isn't far behind, the rise of Destroyer Phoenix Enforcer and the popularity of Phantom Knights and Dragoon helps its case for popularity by a long shot.
The price these two have should settle in nicely once the set hits store shelves! The other PGRs are no slouch either, having excellent cards such as Pot of Extravagance and Mystic Mine and many more to go alongside them. The cheapish staples get some nice blinged-out action too, with cards like Raigeki, Book of Moon, Twin Twisters, and Torrential Tribute!
Chamber Dragonmaid, Invocation, and Scrap Chimera will finally become affordable too, opening a lot of paths to Dragons (Dragonmaid / Dragon Link), Invoked, and Scrap Dinosaurs alike. Invocation in particular has been notoriously expensive for years upon end, now is the time to break the cycle!
And of course, we can't end this article without mentioning the amazing new alternate arts to some great competitive cards. Knightmare Unicorn, Rescue Cat, Lyna, and I:P Masqurena are just some of the ones you can expect to see in MGED!
Dishonorable Mentions
As no set can be perfect, we do have some not-so-great cards in the set. The Numeron reprints are fine, as the Gates and Network become a lot cheaper and easier to work with. However, the Numeronius stuff isn't really good and is just there for ZEXAL baiting for the most part.
Starlight Road is kind of a waste of a PGR slot, as it's already had Gold printings before and the card hasn't been good in ages. You could also argue that the DM stuff didn't need another printing at this point, but nostalgia sells folks,
Fossil Dyna is a bit of an odd one too and so is Dyson Sphere. Aside from that, the set passes with flying colors and is one of the most exciting products to open in 2021!
We don't have time to cover everything, but the gist is that around 90% of the reprinted cards are solid. That's a ratio very few reprint sets can boast, so props to El Dorado! There's something for all duelists and collectors to enjoy here.
Conclusion
And that wraps up our writeup on Maximum Gold: El Dorado! What do you folks think about the set? Is the hype well deserved or are you excited for other products instead? Are you buying boxes/cases or just sticking to singles? Whatever it is, feel free to let us know down below.
