I was doing a little bit of  retrospective this week to see how far I’ve come as a deck-builder and a duelist, musing on things I said and did in the past that I’ve changed my mind about in the past, rather successful year of competitive dueling. I’ve come to the conclusion there are very few things I completely changed my mind about, but being in a more competitive environment I’ve certainly come to respect a few nuances I didn’t possess previously. I’m now seeing a lot of what I did back then in others, and realize how the error of my ways lay in so many smaller things. A lot of what I read here on TCGplayer blogs lately is a lot of inexperienced duelists trying to be original at any cost, passing off ideas as competitive that don’t even stand a chance in most local competitions. Ever since I started with YGO, and long before competition even dawned on me, I already decided that creativity was the highest good for this TCG. It was much more of a rarity in the past, living through several chaos and monarch formats that had only one top deck. I’ve not changed my mind in this regard at all, it is still my ultimate goal to be as original as I can, while letting that creativity be my competitive edge. Creativity for the sake of creativity usually takes away your edge.

Examine your meta ... in-depth.

So here are a few hints for you creative duelists out there, that may help you discern your truly valuable innovations from some of the crap I’ve been reading of late, some of it completely counter-productive. First of all, examine the current meta. That seems logical, but for most this basically stops at a simple assessment of what the top decks are, and what cards can beat them, on paper. Since the majority of these writers don’t play in a very high level competitive environment, they never truly get the chance to test their ideas. An assessment of the meta should start with how many decks are currently seeing play at the top level. A meta like that of old, with one deck like chaos or monarchs dominating seems like a tougher challenge, because the deck obviously has a great many more strengths than other decks, but in reality, this sort of format is ideal. If you can predict that 9 out of 10 games played will be against this one deck, you have a lot of freedom to use cards that otherwise wouldn’t be competitive, as long as your final product plays into abusing the weaknesses of this one deck. During the Monarch formats I won several tournaments using a deck with Ojama trio, Final Attack orders, Great maju Garzett and high-ATK easy to summon monsters like Goblin Elite Attack force, Goblin Attack Force, Cyber Dragon and the Fiend Megacyber. The tendency to use low ATK support monsters was punished by final attack orders (as well as off-setting the weakness of my goblins) while power cards of the day like cyber dragon where completely shut down by the use of Ojama trio as a control element (as well as empowering my own cydra’s and Megacybers), and the massive amount of damage this strategy dealt (imagine ojama trio into a play of Cyber dragon, Fiend megacyber, sac megacyber for great maju garzett while you had an active FAO) against a deck that revolved around control was so disrupting, it was easy to beat the monarch decks. Now don’t get me wrong, that deck was TOTAL jank. But a one-sided format not only lends more power to weaker cards, as long as the deck as a whole combats the top deck of the moment, it also means the chance anyone ever side-decks anything against your rogue deck is non-existent.

Since about March 2007, barring the period between March 2008 until the emergency ban, we’ve seen a lot more diversity at the top level, with anywhere from 3 to 8 top decks seeing play at major competitions. These decks all have their inherent strengths and weaknesses, and that makes it harder to find a unified anti-meta strategy that runs a lot of non-competitive cards like the deck I named earlier. In fact, in those cases an effort like that is futile. At the top level, innovation has always been a matter of one or two tech cards. And while I would never recommend you give up your grand view of creativity to go about tweaking CC decks, lessons can be learned here. In order to be successful in such formats you need a strong and resilient frame-work or engine to build upon, and limit your choices of innovative cards to those that can be useful in multiple match-ups. Most efforts in that regard have been actually about as UN-innovative as the creators think they are innovative, because inevitably they’ve all been either counter-trap tech versions of existing cheap decks (GK, samurai and a lot of gadgets), or cheap decks with a versatile framework (pretty much only gadgets).

I’m going to go off on a little sidetrack here for a moment to address the issue of innovative deckbuilders always attempting to build cheap decks. This is also usually a trait that stems form inexperience at the competitive level. While it is indeed always a good idea to stray from using the absolute money cards in creative decks (lets face it, if you had those cards you would just run teched versions of the top deck anyway) to keep the idea implementable, you needn’t resort to commons and rares all the time. There are plenty of solid competitive cards that don’t cost an arm and a leg, and are often easier to trade for in competitive settings because everyone else is looking for the money cards. On the competitive scene you’ll generally see that the sub-top cards are hard to trade for, because everyone is hoping to bunch them together and trade for a real money card, but when you ask if you can purchase the cards, you’ll usually get an exceptionally good deal, because they know they can’t unload it for more on ebay anyway, with the market so geared towards money cards. It seems strange that so many so-called creative deck-builders are side-tracked by slightly higher costs, stifling their own options for innovation.

Now, getting back on track, I can tie these two paragraphs together by simply stating you don’t need to limit yourself to the obvious to make your creative, janky tech work. During the dominance of DAD return I ran a deck that was built on a destiny hero engine, running a bit like a T-hero of Perfect Circle deck, using warrior cards to support the engine and my choice of tech for the moment : Disciple of the Forbidden spell. A resilient card as a 1700 ATK warrior, the disciples effect allowed for spot removal of large threats when you needed it. This sort of idea works well, but it wouldn’t have worked without the warrior toolbox cards and a sufficiently competitive engine to integrate it into.

The toolbox approach is a must in this format. Utility is currently worth more than consistency.

Before I leave you to your deck-building endeavours, I’d also like to leave you with one of my own findings from recent formats. Decks these days are built like toolboxes. Gladiator beasts run on two proving grounds and two Reinforcements of the Army, while GB themselves can search each other out as needed, DAD runs on Grepher and Armageddon Knight combined with a loads of recursion and draw power, samurai decks run on reasoning and Reinforcement of the Army. This is a crucial thing to remember, because in the past, the anti-meta approach relied on stability. Running three copies of your preferred tech, in order to find them fast against stronger and faster strategies, so you could cut them off from their power plays fast. Because all the top decks these days are built like toolboxes (and can because of several cards that overcome low dependability by digging through the deck faster) they have a lot more utility, allowing them to find the suitable answer to your tech in a timely fashion. As such, if you built your deck with a lot of cards in multiples and you were counting on them to get you the win, odds are you’ll create a lot of dead hands and be stuck with relatively few answers. If you were counting on traps, but the other deck has the option to bring their one copy of Jinzo online on turn two, you can’t really get a whole lot done anymore. As such, as much as doing so pains me, the best answers to the current meta are always decks that have sufficient utility themselves, and have access to multiple answers to the answers. I mean these days you are likely to have to deal with a veritable range of threats from deck to deck, but in the same decks as well. Stopping them all is less an issue now of finding the right card, and more an issue of finding the right card at the right time within the same deck. That’s actually a tip that largely applies to all the top decks as well. I remember thinking that Plasma control was the shit for a regional this year. Running a full complements of fires of doomsday, plasma and phantom skyblaster, I soon found myself ruining my (up to then) perfect regional top 8 record. A big price to pay for an assumption. Lately I’ve been running a deck with 2 plasma’s, 1 scapegoat, 1 fires of doomsday, no skyblasters but a lot of generic trib support (malicious, frog etc) and I seem to be able to bring plasma online whenever I need to, while being stuck with dead, redundant copies of cards considerably less. And that is where competitive experience really comes in. On paper, the more dedicated version looks considerably better, but in real life you need to find the middle ground between consistency and utility. And a good deck-builder will indeed be able to build his framework on paper, but from that to a competitively viable deck still takes quite some testing.

To those of us who do play on a very competitive level, the flaws of some of these suggestions are painfully apparent. Most at the blink of an eye, but some of them when we put the deck together. A good player tests most decks he gets if he even deems them slightly playable, and its an exercise that greatly improves your deck-building skills (even if you build it with proxies). Such decks feel sluggish and they fall apart at the slightest sign of bad luck. And this while some of them really are promising, and with a few tweaks could be genuinely competitive.

Tags: Original Anti-meta Pitfalls

Related to: Yu-Gi-Oh!

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