Metagame.com - Take Your Game to the Next Level

This game we play is filled with risks. Every attack, summon, and spell or trap activation has some element of risk associated with it. When we attack, we run the risk of the strike being blocked or our monster being destroyed. In fact, in any format where Mirror Force is allowed, we risk losing between one and all of our monsters each time we attack. As long as Torrential Tribute and the Trap Hole family exist, our monsters aren’t safe when we summon them. In fact, there isn’t a single move we can make that doesn’t have some chance of backfiring. Good players can assess and manage these risks regardless of the circumstances surrounding them. It’s said that one who dares, wins. More often than not, that’s the truth, and it’s sad to see that many players have shied away from taking the necessary risks to bring their game up a notch. It’s evident from the Top 8 decklists from all the SJCs that have occurred since September 1^st. Players have been progressively moving away from some extremely powerful decks because they use many synergistic cards rather than a pile of utility cards. This creates a greater risk of drawing a hand that isn’t capable of arbitrarily winning a game within the first two turns. These types of decks are also a lot harder to learn how to use successfully, and it seems as if the average player would rather take the easy way instead of trying new decks and sticking with them until he or she has learned what they can do. Thus, players choose to play the absolute simplest deck someone else can imagine for them, and a metagame filled with Monarchs is born.

We can also see a huge fear of risk in the way people actually sit down and play the game. Many players are so concerned about losing a monster to a trap card that they’ll just sit there and wait for Heavy Storm. This lets their opponents come back and win games that they really shouldn’t. Most of the time, these players then go on the message boards and cry about how they had “+ eleventy billion” and lost anyways. The obsession with so-called “card advantage” was born from simple belief that more cards = more options. Well, I have another statement that duelists really ought to keep in mind: there are no wrong threats, only wrong answers.

Speaking of wrong answers, I was very disappointed at many of the responses I received from the last homework. While I was pleased at the sheer volume of responses (almost five times as many as the first homework, some of which managed to end up in my father’s email), the contents left much to be desired. Out of nearly 100 responses, only six provided the correct answer to the last homework problem. Here it is again in case you’ve forgotten:

You’ve maneuvered yourself into a great position with your Freed the Brave Wanderer-based Return from the Different Dimension deck. Your opponent is playing a Dark World deck and is down to 4000 life points with only one card in hand, a useless Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World. You have a Cyber Dragon and an Enemy Controller in hand with Freed, Sangan, and Cyber Dragon on your field in attack mode. You also have a set Mirror Force, so victory is basically assured, right? Wrong. Your opponent topdecks Graceful Charity and draws two more copies of Goldd along with a Dark World Lightning. Just like that, you’re at 2000 life points and one turn away from losing a game that you had no business losing. Fortunately, you do get your Sangan effect, so the question is this: what one card can you fetch from your deck with Sangan to give yourself the greatest chance to win next turn?

Let’s take a look at some of the clearly incorrect answers as we move towards the proper solution. The easiest way to get this wrong was by choosing a card that you can’t get with Sangan. A couple of people wanted to fetch out another copy of Freed the Brave Wanderer, which would probably be a decent idea if it was possible with a Sangan. While that was the easiest way to get it wrong, the most common incorrect responses came in the form of taking cards that have little to no business being in a Freed the Brave Wanderer-based Return from the Different Dimension deck. Apprentice Magician, Mystic Tomato, and Nimble Momonga are all excellent cards, but when was the last time you saw them in a deck based around Light monsters?

While most of the responses were clearly wrong, there were some that weren’t right, but wouldn’t be such a bad plan. Theban Nightmare would make for a very interesting play, but everyone who suggested it forgot about a couple of things. First off, there is no way that Theban Nightmare will make you win the game on your turn. That’s what the problem was asking for. This means that not only does the card you fetch need to facilitate victory, it also needs to do so regardless of what card you draw on your turn. It’s the card you draw at the start of the turn that really sets Theban Nightmare back. You need nothing in your hand or your spell and trap zones in order for it to get the 1500 ATK boost, but if you don’t know what you’re going to draw, you have no clue whether or not you’ll be able to get the bonus. Second, let’s say that you get a card you can play immediately, such as a Smashing Ground. You play it, then summon Cyber Dragon and Theban Nightmare. Tribute Cyber Dragon to Enemy Controller to take a Goldd and ram it into the remaining Goldd. Theban Nightmare then swings for 3000, which puts your opponent at 1000, not 0. 1000 isn’t good enough in a game where a topdecked Brain Control can make your otherwise excellent play a moot point.

Another one of my favorite (incorrect) answers was Jowgen the Spiritualist. Taking Jowgen will allow you to annihilate the opponent’s field regardless of what you draw, but there’s no way for you to win the game that turn if you do it. Jowgen prohibits all special summons and destroys all special summoned monsters with its effect. That would make your Cyber Dragon useless. Furthermore, the discard to Jowgen’s effect is random, so you don’t even know what you’ll be discarding. That makes it impossible to plan a victory around Jowgen’s effect because it makes the turn dependant on what you draw at the start.

Finally, my absolute favorite (incorrect) answer was Rocket Warrior. A grand total of three people suggested it, and while I think it would definitely put you in an excellent position going into your opponent’s turn and possibly win you the game, that chance depends on the draw and thus is far less likely than the chance of winning with the correct answer.

What is the correct answer, you ask? To find it, we need to take a trip in the Way Back Machine all the way to Sangan’s home town of Metal Raiders. There we shall find that the correct solution to the problem is Time Wizard With it, you have a 50/50 shot of winning or losing in the next turn. Just summon your Cyber Dragon and your Time Wizard, and then activate the effect of Time Wizard. You then chain Enemy Controller, tributing Time Wizard to steal a Goldd. If you win the flip, you win the game. If not, you lose. It’s as easy as that.

Only six people got it right, but a few more seemed to realize the answer and deliberately answered the question incorrectly because they refused to believe that Time Wizard was the correct choice. Why would someone see the correct play right in front of him or her, and then consciously choose to not make it? My guess is fear. Fear that it won’t work and that he or she would lose the game. More on that shortly, but first the scoring:

The biggest thing that holds players back from making great moves is fear. Fear that something will go wrong, fear that they’ll be made fun of by the “pros” if it does, and certainly fear of losing the game. All of these fears weigh on the player’s mind, and he or she backs down and decides to “play it safe.” If the players makes the conservative play and his or her opponent proceeds to win, the player can claim that it was luck on the part of the opponent and not a deficiency of the player’s own judgment that caused the loss. If not, he or she made a really “pro” move and is clearly “out-playing” the other guy. There have actually been scientific studies on this sort of thing that support the following theory: people are more willing to take a risk if it’s framed in terms of possible gains and less likely if it’s framed in terms of possible losses. In the case of the people who saw that Time Wizard was the right answer and decided against it anyway, they were probably thinking, “If I take that, I have a 50% chance of losing the game.” The people who did pick Time Wizard were probably thinking, “If I take this, I have a 50% chance of winning the game.” After all, which one would you rather do, win or lose? The thing is, I never said that the monster you took had to guarantee a win. I just wanted you to pick the monster to give you the greatest chance of winning. Around 80% of the solutions weren’t even an attempt at winning. Some of them tried to maximize their own card presence while depleting the opponent’s, while others ignored the possibility of the game ending and decided to try to wait the opponent out. That’s not playing to win, that’s playing to not lose, and seeing the distinction between the two is one of the things that defines a well-rounded player. Play to win and keep in mind what you stand to gain from taking a given risk. You’ll see a drastic improvement in your decision-making abilities.

With this in mind, let’s turn to a related subject. How do we go about judging what is or is not an acceptable risk? If we take every chance we get regardless of how small the gain is, we’re eventually (and probably quickly) going to get burned. In general, the risks you want to take are the ones that provide the most potential gain for the least potential loss. Unfortunately, things don’t usually present themselves quite as simply as that, so to help get a sense of what you want to look for, here is a set of problems that are all about risks and whether or not you should take them.

Take some time to think these out, set them up on the table if you have to, and write up your solutions. When you’re finished, come on back and read on.

Starting with the first situation, if you were to attack successfully, you would win the game. There’s no danger of Divine Wrath because the Counter-Fairy player has no cards in his hand. Judging by the counter-traps already played, there also isn’t any evidence to suggest he’s using Divine Wrath at all. Looking at the number of cards left in the deck shows that the chance of one of the face-downs being Mirror Force is pretty low, but the fact that the opponent put Freed in attack position may signal that he indeed has Mirror Force. Of course, it may just mean that he absolutely had to get Exiled Force off the field last turn and has decided to try and bluff you into not attacking. Regardless of whether or not the set cards are a bluff or a temporary deterrent (or even the genuine article), the result of a successful attack would be victory. The absolute worst possible outcome is that they destroy your monster. Even if that is the case, you still don’t lose if they block the attack and you only have to do 50 damage to win. Basically any monster you conceivably play can do 50 damage and you have the means to clear Freed off the field. In this situation, you definitely go for it rather than wait for your opponent to find a way around Lily. Full credit if you went for it with remotely similar reasoning.

In part B, you need to evaluate how much that 2100 damage is worth to you this early in the game. It’s not enough to put anybody out of Stein range and it’s a documented fact that players tend to put the monsters that they want you to destroy onto the field first before the ones that they actually want you to attack. That means that if your opponent had a Sangan or Treeborn Frog, it’s likely that she set it first, and if you nail that with Exiled Force, you could be in serious trouble, especially if her spell or trap can stop Cyber Dragon. This case is really pretty clear-cut. You don’t go for it this early in the game. That 2100 damage is going to seem really insignificant in the long run when it turns out you wasted your Exiled Force on something silly like Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive instead of an important card like Apprentice Magician. For more on why blindly destroying a face-down card with Exiled Force is a bad idea most of the time, I’ll refer you to Jason’s “Trends ‘N’ Tactics” from November 3^rd. Full credit for wisely choosing to save your Exiled Force.

Finally, we come to a rather interesting situation involving the Begone, Knave! deck. In this situation, you don’t have Begone, Knave! on the field, which is a pretty big problem for a deck based around the card. Thus, if your attack is successful, you stand to possibly draw into your key card. If it fails, you lose a Masked Sorcerer or it becomes trapped on the field (possibly requiring the use of Offerings to the Doomed). Fortunately, out of all the monsters in your deck, Masked Sorcerer is among the ones your opponent is most likely to let through. An opponent drawing a card is a lot less threatening than being forced to discard, so a wily player may choose to let Sorcerer through even if the opponent has a Sakuretsu Armor so he can play Cyber Dragon next turn. Of course, if he does that, we have him right where we want him. In this case, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to put a Masked Sorcerer on the field, even though we have no ready way to bring it back to hand.

In the case of Don Zaloog, the answer is a definitive yes. Making your opponent discard is an extremely powerful effect because it makes her less able to stop you in coming turns, even if you don’t draw into Begone, Knave! Don forces an action from the opponent, and if she doesn’t have any response, you can try to nail her again next turn by destroying any face-up monster she plays with your Offerings to the Doomed. You then get to hit her with Don again to make it even harder for her to come back. For Majestic Mech - Ohka, you definitely don’t summon it or attack. The purpose of Ohka is to destroy big monsters the opponent manages to summon and then nail her for damage if you have Begone, Knave! out. There’s no real benefit to trying to hit for the 2400 when both players are at full life and you have no way to bring back the Ohka. You essentially have little to gain and a whole lot to lose. No deal.

+2.5 points for not summoning Ohka because you have no way to bring it back and no need to do damage right now.

If you got full credit this week, excellent job. Analyzing risks is an extremely difficult skill to master, and it looks like you’ve got a pretty good grasp. If you had between 20 and 30 points this week, you probably came up with one of the cool-but-wrong answers for the homework. Since you did well on this week’s problem, though, I think it’s fair to say that you’re definitely on the right track. Nice job! If you got between 10 and 20 points, you might want to study the inner workings of the decks used in this week’s problem. You may understand the general idea, but you need to be aware of the complexities brought in by specific cases in order to see the full picture. Finally, if you got less than 10 points, don’t fret. This is one of the toughest subjects a duelist will encounter in his trials, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t get it right away. Try building the decks used in the problem and play them for a bit to see how they work, then go from there. The School of Duel will return in a couple of weeks, so until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

HOMEWORK: Next time, we’re going to talk about how to wisely choose cards for a deck. Until then, try your hand at this little exercise:

Imagine that you’re building a deck based around removing every single card your opponent gets from the game. From the given list of cards, rank them in order of “most useful” to “least useful.”