Building and maintaining your skills should be your first priority as a competitive duelist. Everything else is commentary. This week I have some practical ways for you, the aspiring duelist, to build your skills and maintain them.

Daily Practice

The best way to develop skills and maintain them is daily practice. If you’re in a rush to become good, play several hours a day and you’ll be up to par to compete in your next tournament with ease. But not many people have the time for practicing daily.

It’s true that the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG is a very time-intensive game, but that doesn’t mean you can’t spread out your time and skill-building activities to accomplish the same results. This ties a lot into time management, which I covered in my first article.

Six to eight hours a week is sufficient to build a tremendous amount of skill and maintain it, so long as you are researching, evolving, and following the metagame adequately. You can spread your actual play time throughout the seven days in a week.

Here are some ways to spread the time (assuming you can devote eight hours a week to it):

·         One hour per day Monday-Saturday, two hours on Sunday.

·         Two hours per day for four days (i.e., two hours Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday).

·         Eight hours in one day (this one is painful).

·         Two days at four hours apiece (a great weekend solution).

What If I Can’t Physically Play Eight Hours a Week?

There are alternative ways to “practice” or “build skills” during your busy week. I’m a big fan of reading articles and keeping a fresh perspective on the game. Nothing hurts worse than holding on to old ideas. Remember my rule of thumb: your deck needs to be updated at least every three months or you’ll fall behind.

I recommend reading the daily articles on Metagame.com, as well as articles on other sites, for 30 minutes to an hour each day. This will help you stay fresh and “tuned in” to the metagame.

Keep Your Ears Open to the Community

There is no better method of information gathering than keeping your ears open to the community and listening to the latest buzz. Listening to the community allows you to spot growing trends, test out ideas before you commit them to a deck, and get up-to-the-minute info. Online forums are a good place for this, especially large forums.

The smaller forums are a little tricky. They might suffer from an extreme case of collectivist or conclave-like thinking. Sometimes you’ll catch wind of their favorite mantra, “We’re always right and everyone else is wrong.” You have to be careful and know what you’re getting into.

Talk to Your Friends

Another idea factory can be your closest friends and dueling buddies. It pays to listen carefully and consider a wacky idea from another angle instead of dismissing it right away. You have to learn to invert your thinking and think about things from the other side of the coin. Instead of saying, “This won’t work,” ask yourself, “What if this actually worked?” Look at an idea from both sides of the table then test it out during practice.

Skill Maintenance

Anyone can develop the skills they need to win big in this game, but you have to put in the time for it. Developing any kind of skill takes repetition and a reasonable time-investment. The more you repeat and practice, the easier it gets for you.

On the flipside, anyone can develop the skills they need to win one tournament. The true test of dueling prowess is to maintain those skills and use them often enough to win many tournaments. Remember that we may learn by repetition but we also have a tendency to lose what we learned over time if we don’t use it. You have to keep using those skills you learned and improve upon them.

It is perfectly okay to let yourself slip every once in a while. You can conquer this “deterioration tendency” by constantly practicing and maintaining those skills. Frequent practice develops the skills to the maximum and keeps stretching them. Then, if you slip a bit, all you have to do is “get back into the swing of things” and you’ll find that your skills will come back to you very quickly. It’s a nifty trick, but then again, it’s not really a trick at all. It’s just how we are.

What It Takes to Stay Competitive in Tournament Play

I’m sure you’ve wondered what it takes to stay competitive in tournament play right?

It takes, practice, dedication, skill, determination, tenacity, time, a sharp mind, and a little luck. The number-one thing you must do is practice, practice, practice. The more you do it, the better you get. It’s that simple.

Staying competitive takes determination and tenacity. You have to give a hand to those duelists who go to almost every Shonen Jump Championship in the year. That takes a lot of cash and determination to pull off consistent performances at these high-level tournaments (not to mention the level of skill and the dedication in developing those skills). It might not seem like much, but there isn’t a Shonen Jump Champion out there who will tell that you don’t need to do the following:

• Stay up-to-date.
• Practice, practice, practice.
• Pay attention to the community.
• Always re-evaluate your own ideas from “the other side of the table.”

This advice may seem old hat and repetitive, but I can’t stress it enough to you. If there’s anything that’s helped me nail my victories it’s definitely doing these practical things to keep my game up.

If you want to win, keep it simple and try out my advice. It’s really not that hard. It just takes discipline to follow.

 “The hard rule of ‘Use-It-or-Lose-It’ Tendency tempers its harshness for the diligent. Skills of a very high order can be maintained only by daily practice. It is also essential for a thinking man to assemble his skills into a checklist that he routinely uses. Any other mode of operation will cause him to miss much that is important.”

—Charles T. Munger