Section 1: What makes a good competitive deck?
Section 2: What wins games?
Section 3: Side Deck theory
Section 4: Test 1, 2, 3. And then 30?
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Section 1: What makes a competitive deck?
Well there are many important factors that define a deck as competitive. But in short there are three main factors involved in a deck actually make it a successful and competitive build. Let’s go over them
The first main factor that make a deck competitive is how consistent and quickly you can get your win condition out. Typically the first player to get their win condition out is the one that will win the game. Every best deck out there has a win condition with 2 or more ways that allow them to win.
Let’s take satellar knights for instance. The main combo involves around a level/rank 4 engine in order to gain hand/field advantage. The main 3 cards that allow you to recycle is Vega, Altair, and Deneb. This allows you to keep recycling cards and gaining card advantage which I will be talking about in the next section.
The second factor that determines what decks are good is what other competitive decks are being commonly played. Certain decks have advantage over others because each deck has a unique way of winning based on the combos the deck provides.
Just say the format currently has Macro Rabbits, Mermails and Fire Fists as the top meta decks right now:
Knowing the weak points in each deck is also important in competitive play. Each deck has an advantage over the other. Mermails typically can overpower fire fists, but rely on a graveyard which can be shut down by Macro cosmos or dimensional fissure. Fire fists do better vs macro rabbits due to it not being too reliant on graveyard making macro cosmos less effective. Macro rabbits shut down Mermails but don’t have the same consistency as fire fists.
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Section 2: What wins games?
The main factor that plays the role in who wins the game in yugioh is whoever has the greater card advantage over the other. So I think I may know one question you may be having. What the heck is card advantage? Well a brief answer would be the amount you gain from cards or combos. This means how much and how quickly you gather more resources from your deck to get more cards than your opponent. What is the best way to gain more card advantage? Well there are two main ways to consistently gain card advantage. They are by searching from deck and drawing cards directly from deck. I’m going to use Fire Fist to demonstrate how this may affect the consistency of your deck.
Now just Imagine I’m using a 40 card deck.
First is searching from the deck. This means adding cards directly from deck to hand. I’m just going to say I run 3 Fire Formation Tenki, 2 Brotherhood of the Fire Fist Rooster, and 2 Brotherhood of the Fire Fist Leopard. This is a total of 7 cards. This means you technically now you have a 33 card deck to work with.
Now is draw power. This is drawing cards from the top of your deck through card effects. Let’s just say I run 3 Reckless Greed, 2 of duality and 3 Upstart Goblin. Now that’s 8 less cards in my deck. Now I have only a 25 card deck instead of a 40 card deck. This is almost half the size of your deck!
What about the card advantage though?
Well gaining card advantage is done through the concept of plusses and minuses. Just imagine you open with a reinforcement of the army and then you search Deneb. You just did a 1 for 1 trade you played a spell card that is now in the grave. That doesn’t make you gain advantage but If you then combine it with the effect of Deneb, you normal summon that Deneb and search for Altair now you gained 1 card since you are using a combination of 2 effects. Now you just gained a +1. This means you are ending up with 1 more card than you just used.
Combos are important because they allow you to end up with more cards than you started with quicker. Like I said earlier the quicker you gain card advantage over your opponent, the more likely you are going to win the game. This is because you have more options to outplay your opponent. Wins are determined on your combos, matchups ,and the deck that gains the most card advantage to win duels.
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Section 3: Side Deck theory
The side deck theory is how you should side in order to win games against most of the commonly played decks not all decks. My best advice to going about this is examining the Meta and finding out how to exploit the weakness of those decks. You only want to side vs the top tier decks. This is because you want to keep your rating up and thus you will probably be going against most of the Meta. If you side against the Meta it will make your deck more efficient and help you get your rating up.
I talked about a list of decks that are the best now I’m going to suggest making a list of cards that shut down the current top decks. Imma pretend the major 3 threats in the current format are majespectors, kozmos, and psy-frames.
I’m going to be making a short list of possible side deck options and what they would be useful against if those were the top 3 decks this format.
Imperial iron wall
Prohibition
Mistake
Majesty’s fiend
Void trap hole
Royal Decree
Macro Cosmos
Retaliating “c”
Artifact lancea
Vanity’s emptiness
Mind crush
Mistaken arrest
Maxx “c”
Skill drain
Ok that’s my incomplete list xD anyways imam now list which cards are effective against which decks.
Psy-frames:
Vanity’s emptiness
Mind crush
Majesty’s fiend
Skill drain
Retailiating “C”
Maxx “c”
Imperial iron wall
Kozmos:
Imperial iron wall
Maxx “c
Artifact lancea
Necrovalley
Mind crush
Majespectors:
Void trap hole
Mistaken arrest
Mistake
Macro cosmos
Skill drain
Royal decree
You want to come up with a list of side deck choices in order to shut them down that also won’t hurt your win condition. The main goal of siding is to shut down the decks that might give you trouble in particular bad matchups. I recommend siding 4-6 cards for your worst matchup, 3-4 cards for your second 2-3 cards for your third/fourth worst matchup.
But why did I list like the same card for all 3 like mind crush? Well cards like that are less situational and I would prefer to put those in the side over others because they shut down the meta. Just make sure to be aware if it would hurt your win condition. For example you don’t want to run imperial iron wall is kozmo because you’ll be locked down. Even if it’s a good card vs psy-frames.
So if I were running kozmos for instance and I was given the above choice I would be running a side like this:
2 royal decree- good vs other floodgates like imperial.
3 mind crush – pretty much powerful vs all 3 of the decks but it does not hurt my deck
1 majesty’s fiend- good vs psy-frames and majespectres possibly
1 vanity’s emptiness good for mirror/psy frames
3 Retailiating “C” completely wrecks pendulums in general because it banishes them also it searches for a maxx “c” when destroyed.
3 Prohibition – good vs psy-frames
2 Void trap hole – just completely screws over a pendulum summon and can also banish the synchro summon of another monster.
See? If I were given side options above this is the way I set up my side if I were to use kozmo if psy-frames and majespectres were the other top 2 decks.
Note: this is just a hypothetical example to demonstrate how to improve deck building and to examining card choices.
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Section 4: Testing 1, 2, 3 and then 30?
Practice makes perfect when it comes to dueling. This can separate people who are successful and people who lose due to an unbalanced deck. A lot of people who net deck don’t quite know how to play the deck as well as those who know how to make a deck more balanced. Most people don’t quite keep in mind that everybody has their own playing style. So how do you know when your deck is balanced? The fact is the only way to truly balance out your deck is through testing.
Usually it is best to test a deck at least 20-30 times so that you know how the deck works and you know what changes will affect the decks performance for a positive outcome. This actually kills to two birds with one stone so to speak. Not only are you finding out how to build the deck better, also you’re figuring out what the best meta decks are and what to expect from each deck that Is out there.
Note: most professionals do 100 or more duels before they consider their deck to be ready for rated/tournament play
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To conclude this article, I thank you so much for taking the time to read this article and I hope to inspire others to write more. If you have any comments and suggestions on my article please feel free to reply. Thank you.
