Dueling Heroes 25th Anniversary Tin Review

It is no small achievement! Yu-Gi-Oh! Is celebrating a quarter-century of exciting adventures and great battles with a beautiful, collector-worthy Dueling Heroes tin full of treasured reprints that has got everyone excited!

What’s In The Box?

Before even addressing the contents, I want to really take a moment to appreciate how amazing this tin is. An absolute beauty of a statement to Konami’s quality control. The artwork is incredible, and it really pays homage to the legacy created by the game over the last 25 years. On the tin we can find the artworks for the 16 different quarter century secret rares that are available in this set as well as artworks of our heroes Yugi, Jaden, Yuya, Yusaku, Yusei and Yuma (boy, that’s a mouthful!).

Inside the tin, you’ll find one of sixteen different limited edition Quarter Century Secret Rare cards and 3 Mega Packs. In my case, I got in my tin a copy of Salamangreat Blaze Dragon (I know, it’s a bit disappointing… but hopefully that means you have better odds of pulling a Dark Magician or a Stardust Dragon yourself!)

Inside each Mega Pack you will be able to pull 2 Prismatic Secret Rares, 2 Ultra Rares, 1 Super Rare and 1 Rare as well as 12 other common cards pulled out from a selection of Yu-Gi-Oh’s most recent sets including Battle of Chaos, Dimension Force, Darkwing Blast, Tactical Masters, The Grand Creators and others (click on this link for a full list). Since you get three Mega Packs, you will end up with a total of 54 cards plus the promotional Quarter Century Secret Rare, which is good value especially considering how some of these pulls might pay for the rest of your cards if you’re lucky enough.

My Experience & Pulls

I have to be honest, I was unlucky with this tin and with my pulls (to the point it put me off of writing the review immediately after, it really was discouraging…) But of course, we know this is part of the hobby: sometimes we’re lucky, other times not so much. It’s about the experience, about that addicting feeling we get when opening a new pack of freshly printed cards and the excitement to find out what we got that time. These were the rare pulls I had from each mega pack:

Pack 1 – Naturia Camellia, Munin The Runick Wings, Illegal Knight, Scatter Fusion, Fateful Adventure and Lady Labrynth Of The Silver Castle

Pack 2 – Morphtronic Converter, Epsilon The Magnet Warrior, Magicore Of The Relics, Blackwing Boreastorm The Wicked Wing, Exosister Irene and Muckraker From The Underworld

Pack 3 – Therion “Bull” Ain, Extra Pendulum, Runick Flashing Fire, Libromancer Fire, Visas Starfrost and Blazing Cartesia, The Virtuous

Of all of them, unfortunately the only ones I got kind of excited for was Fateful Adventure and Blazing Cartesia and I guess Muckraker From The Underworld wasn’t too bad either, but yeah… can’t win every time! One good thing I will say for the Megapacks though is that I got only two duplicates, and that is a good thing in anyone’s book.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I can certainly see why this tin has got a lot of people excited. At this price point, it’s very good value. It makes it easier to find certain rarer cards and cuts through a lot of the not-so-interesting commons from the various sets it covers, ultimately making it even more interesting. It is also a great choice for players looking to build new competitive decks, as it will lower the market price of sought after cards in the current metagame (Deviser King, Garura and some Labrynth cards are good examples).

Ultimately, the Dueling Heroes 25th Anniversary Tin has something for everyone with a lot of different interesting reprints, be it for current meta, possible future meta or even outdated decks than need boost of life. There is a substantial absence of Tearlaments and Spright archetypes and maybe a couple of current metagame staples, but I suspect these will be made available in the 25th Anniversary Rarity Collection which is due to be released later this year still. The tin itself is gorgeous, and it works as a great storage solution for cards as well. I’m sure any collector would be more than happy to have this one.