Best Yu Gi Oh Edison decks, Ranked (2024)

Edison is a fan-made format based on the format played at the Shonen Jump Championship 75 in Edison Jersey in 2010. The deck pool during this tournament is widely considered to be one of the best eras of Yu-Gi-Oh!, and the Edison format uses the exact products and banlist of the Shonen Jump event. Thanks to online influencers, the Edison format has skyrocketed in popularity, becoming one of the two most popular retro formats (the other being Goat format). The format has been expanded on and explored as more players work within the confines of its restrictions, with some new decks rising to the top that weren’t seen during Edison’s original time period. These are the seven best Yu-Gi-Oh! decks for Edison format.

✓ Johnny’s Annotation:

What sets are legal in Edison

Edison format allows all cards from the Legend Of Blue-Eyes White Dragon to Duelist Pack: Kaiba sets. The banlist follows the same banlist that was used during the Shonen Jump Championship 75.

7. Gladiator Beasts

Gladiator Beasts is an aggressive deck focused on the battle phase. All Gladiator Beast monsters have the effect to return to the deck after attacking to switch out for a different Gladiator Beast monster. Each Gladiator Beast also has an effect that turns on when they’re special summoned by a Gladiator Beast monster. This allows you to constantly swap between Gladiator Beast cards to give you the best ones for any given gamestate. 

With how easy it is to get any Gladiator Beast monster out from your deck, Gladiator Beast decks don’t tend to run too many of them. Instead, they opt for multiple spell and trap cards to help either get cards into your hand or get rid of cards on your opponent’s field. It plays a lot of battle traps as a way to act as removal, ensuring your opponent’s battlefield is clear for your Gladiator Beasts to get in for a ton of damage.

6. Quickdraw Dandywarrior

Quickdraw Dandywarrior is actually the deck that won the Shonen Jump Championship that Edison is named after. However, while it is a top deck in the format it isn’t the best deck you can be playing. That being said, Quickdraw Dandywarrior is a fantastic metagame choice. The deck is named after Quickdraw Synchron and Dandylion and their synergy together. Quickdraw Synchron can discard a card to special summon itself, and Dandylion creatures two level one tokens when it’s sent to the graveyard. Quickdraw Synchron can be used as any “Synchron” tuner, letting you play a utility of synchro monsters in your extra deck to bring whatever synchro is needed for any given gamestate. 

Quickdraw Dandywarrior has a lot of consistency, with multiple cards such as Sangan, Lonefire Blossom, and Super-Nimble Mega Hamster capable of bringing monsters out from your deck to the field. There is also a mill package with Card Trooper, Foolish Burial, and Morphing Jar to trigger your Danylion as well as put fodder in the graveyard to special summon with Debris Dragon (which is also a tuner to go into your various synchro monsters easily). 

5. Dragons

Unlike many Yu-Gi-Oh! decks, Dragons in Edison are built around the monster type Dragon. There is a lot of support for the type within Edison, most notable bein Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon which can easily special summon itself, and special summon a Dragon monster from either the hand or graveyard to keep putting on the pressure. Special summoning these Dragons is enough to OTK sometimes, with handful of synchro Dragon monsters to go into. Most of the synchro monsters are Dragons, since Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon can special summon them from the graveyard if they ever get removed.

Dragons are especially strong in Edison thanks to how good their draw power is. You have ways to get Blue-Eyes White Dragon into your hand easily, which can then be discarded with Trade-In for two cards. Super Rejuvenation can draw a lot of cards if you’re constantly discarding and tributing your Dragon monsters during the end phase. There are a few Tuner Dragon monsters with low attack, which can be discard for Cards Of Consonance to draw two cards. All this draw power makes Dragons very consistent and one of the best decks in Edison format.

4. Hero Frog

Hero Frog combines the HERO archetype with the Frog archetype. Frogs and HEROs are both filled with searchability, capable of thinning your deck and getting monsters onto the battlefield easily. One way the deck wins is by locking your opponent out of attacking by having two copies of Dupe Frog on the field, something Frogs can easily accomplish. Dupe Frog makes it so you can only attack it, so having two Dupe Frogs on the field means you can’t attack either. 

Since Frogs are so good at flooding the battlefield, Monarchs find room in the deck to take advantage of their tribute summon effects. The HERO lineup acts as a utility toolbox, and Elemental HERO Stratos is a way to get them into your hand. There’s a handful of tuner monsters in the extra deck, letting you go into them with the one-of Junk Synchron. Miracle Fusion is the other reason for playing the HERO monsters, so you go into powerful fusion monsters like Elemental HERO Absolute Zero which is hard to remove without causing your opponent’s entire field to go with it. 

3. Lightsworn

Lightsworn is one of the top decks in Edison built around one archetype. The Lightsworn strategy is about self-milling yourself, as the Lightsworn monsters benefit from being milled into the graveyard. One of the payoffs for having a lot of Lightsworn monsters is Judgment Dragon, which can destroy all other cards on the field so it can keep attacking without having to worry about trap cards or defending monsters. It also mills four cards at each of your end phases to trigger more of your Lightsworn monster’s effects. 

Lightsworn has no trouble with milling cards, with Edison having many ways to do such both in-archetype and with generic support cards including Card Trooper, Charge of the Light Brigade, and Solar Recharge. The deck is very consistent, capable of slowing your opponent down with stun effects and pushing advantage by special summoning monsters for free to build up a board state. 

2. Vayu Turbo

Vayu Turbo gets its name from the card Blackwing – Vayu The Emblem Of Honor. Its a unique tuner monster in that it can’t be used on the field but instead needs to be in the graveyard to synchro with. Vayu can be used as a defense position monster to keep your life points safe to then later turn it into a high-stat synchro monster later, or sent to the graveyard directly with Card Trooper or Armageddon Knight. 

Since you’re putting so many Dark monsters into the graveyard, Dark Armed Dragon makes an appearance in Vayu turbo as a way to easily special summon it. Vayu Turbo wants Vayu in the graveyard quickly so you can start taking advantage of its effect right away. Multiple ways of interacting with cards in the banished zone are played to re-use Vayu and the non-tuner it used to keep pumping out synchro monsters to overpower your opponent with strong synchro monsters they can’t do much about short of trap cards. 

1. Blackwings

The deck with so many tops in Edison format tournaments, Blackwings stand as the best deck in the Edison format. During the days of Edison, there weren’t too many notable archetypes, especially ones as fleshed out as Blackwings. Blackwings were one of the first major archetypes where everything synergized so well and started pushing Yu-Gi-Oh! to its current archetype-centric meta. 

The deck is very consistent, capable of performing various combos and bringing out multiple Blackwings in one turn. The archetype is built around synchro monsters, easily bringing out tuners and non-tuner monsters with varying effects. Since there are a lot of generic synchro monsters, Blackwings have both in-archetype synchros as well as generic ones to act as a bit of a toolbox to have access to for various matchups. Blackwings are so strong in Edison because they are an aggressive deck that can be backed up by a solid selection of spell and trap cards without sacrificing consistency. There’s a lot of searchability in the deck, especially with Black Whirlwind which gets any Blackwing with less attack than one normal summoned. Blackwing decks can interact with the graveyard, using it as a second resource to continue to push advantage and making it hard to break through its defenses. There’s a reason Blackwings so often occupy the top seats at Edison tournaments, it does everything you want a Yu-Gi-Oh! Edison deck to be doing.

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That’s as much as we have on the best Edison decks in Yu Gi Oh! If none of these pick your fancy, you might prefer to take a look at the best structure decks instead, or the entire banlist for 2024.