The Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship 2024 will be hosted in Seattle, Washington, on September 7-8, according to publisher Konami. This is the first time that the finals of global Yu-Gi-Oh! organised play will be hosted in the USA since 2016.
The Yu-Gi-Oh! World Champsionship (WCS) 2024 will feature four different types of tournament across three different Yu-Gi-Oh! games. As in previous WCS there will be a paper Yu-Gi-Oh TCG tournament, digital Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel tournament, and mobile Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links Speed Duel tournament.
This year will also host a Duel Links Rush Duel tournament, a new and even faster game mode added in September 2023.
For your chance to qualify for the TCG portion of the WCS, you’ll need to earn enough World Qualifying Points from specific events: Regional Qualifiers, Dragon Duels, OTS Championships, Nationals in Latin America, and the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series.
Placing highly at a World Championship Qualifier event will also earn you an automatic entry. Konami has released details of the WCQ events as follows:
| Region | Date | Location |
| Central America | June 21-23 | Mexico City, Mexico |
| Oceania | June 28-30 | Auckland, New Zealand |
| South America | June 28-30 | Lima, Peru |
| North America | July 19-21 | Austin, Texas (USA) |
| Europe | July 26-28 | Berlin, Germany |
The last WCS, held in Tokyo in 2023, was something of a landmark for the game. It was the first WCS to take place since 2019, as the COVID-19 pandemic put organised play on hiatus. It hosted the debut Master Duel tournament, with the game only having released in 2022.
The 2023 world champion was Paulie Aronson from the US, who defeated Peru’s Mateo Renteria. That was also something of a first – the first time since 2014 that a player from a nation that plays the TCG rather than the OCG (the slightly older variant played in South East Asia) had won.
The WCS was last held in the US in 2016. The TCG finals were between Japan’s Hiyama Shunsuke and America’s Erik Godwin Christensen, both playing variant Blue-Eyes YuGiOh decks; Shunshuke was victorious.
Excited? Wargamer has handy guides to the YuGiOh rules, and the all important YuGiOh banlist and YuGiOh Master Duel banlist, to make sure your decks are duel ready.