Learning to take action is important in everything you do, especially in this game. Nothing happens unless something moves. I’ve talked about goals before and their importance. However, goals are nothing but fleeting dreams unless you do things to move you closer to them.

Everyone wants to be a champion right? How many players actually go through the same motions that champions do? How many duelists really take the time to hone their skills and perfect their craft constantly? There’s a reason why there are only three people who receive the prize card in the main event at a Shonen Jump Championship. It’s not luck. In a sea of equally talented players and equally matched decks, what differentiates between the winners and losers?

I believe that superb duelists have a certain set of habits that others don’t, one of them being the action habit. They take action. If they discover an idea that might prove beneficial, then they will act on it. How many duelists will come up with an idea and never act on it? If there was ever a sure-fire way to gain success in anything, it would be taking action. When you act, you create a force that can propel you to incredible heights. How often do you practice? When you stumble upon an idea, do you build a deck around it, or do you let it sit on the back burner?

A big lesson I learned at my most recent competition is this: if you want to be a champion, then you need to act like one. When you have ambitious goals, then you need to take matters into your own hands and go through the motions. Don’t sit there and practice only once or twice per week, go to a Regional Qualifier and expect to take home a Nationals Qualification. It takes a little more than that.

How to Use Habits to Your Advantage

Almost 95 percent of what we do is governed by our habits. Habits are sets of instructions that run on auto-pilot to make things easier for us. It makes it easier to think and function in the world around us. To use them to your advantage, it helps if you take a look at what your habits are . . . often. I heard a saying once: “You don’t feel the chains of habit until they’re too heavy to bear.” Your mission is to cultivate good Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG habits. Learn to practice when you know you should. Learn how to look at mistakes from a different perspective. Learn to shrug off each defeat to move on toward your goals.

The way to develop good habits starts with recognizing the need to change. When it comes to changing how we do things, we tend to “snap back” to the known way of doing things. It’s similar to how a rubber band works. You can stretch it pretty far, but if you don’t stretch far enough, then it’ll snap back into place. Your goal is make this “rubber band” break. There are many ways to accomplish this. One good way is to do something every day to bring yourself closer to your desired goal. If you keep doing that, you’ll stretch so far that you’ll break that rubber band.

Let’s say you’ve just gotten home from school or work and you have a two-hour time block all to yourself. There are many things you can do with your time. You can read a book, watch TV, play some Xbox, surf the internet, or play the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG. Let’s say that you have a tournament coming up next week and you need to practice. You really want to do well at this next event since you didn’t do so well at the last one. What will you do? Will you say, “I can practice tomorrow, later, or this weekend” and put it off? Most players do.

When it comes to achieving anything worthwhile, the words “tomorrow” and “later” are your enemies. The word “now” is your friend and will guide you to the success you’re looking for. If you know you have to do something, do it now. The same goes for practice. Practice involves some pretty intense thought, self-reflection, and work. It requires focus and time. If you don’t do it now and save it for later when it’s too late, what kind of results do you think you’ll get?

Here’s a secret. The next time you’re faced with something that will require a lot of time and hard work on your part, start doing small things to build momentum. For example, let’s say you have to clean the house as one of your chores. Cleaning a whole house is a huge undertaking. It’s not fun, but it has to be done. Build your momentum by finishing the easiest thing first: cleaning the kitchen counter. All you need is some all-purpose cleaner and a paper towel. Once you’re done with that, you’ll have to dust the counters. Sooner or later you’ll realize that each new task gets easier and easier. The same applies to practice. Start with the easy things like sleeving your deck, writing down a decklist, or shuffling the deck. Get yourself in motion.

Using Blind Persistence and Experimentation to Your Advantage

The path of goal achievement is a tough one. There are inevitable bumps along the road that you have to deal with. A universal quality of champions is persistence. If you want to grow your skills, then you must be persistent in growing them. If you want to build the most impressive deck, then you must persist.

Let’s assume you’re trying to build a tournament-winning deck. You have a Shonen Jump Championship coming to your region and you don’t want to go home empty-handed. First, you decide to borrow a decklist from one of the latest Top 16s. You build it and you play a few games with it, but you discover that it didn’t function as well as you’d hoped. “What the heck is wrong with this deck?” you say. Why won’t it work for you? First, because it wasn’t built by you. Second, you have little experience with it. Each deck is unique to its owner despite similarities in the build. Each duelist has his or her own preferences, even though the general concept is usually the same.

A big mistake many players make is that they expect a deck to perform in an outstanding way without first understanding it. The keys to making a deck work for you are persistence and experimentation. You’ve got to learn to be a tinkerer. Expand your limits and try new cards. Deckbuilding isn’t rocket science. You don’t need to be a whiz at creating new concepts. Leave that to the inventive minds. I learned this the hard way. I had this belief that I had to be a super-intelligent inventor and innovator to be a good player. This, I found, was nonsense.

Over time, I’ve learned that I am much more suited to playing the deck than dreaming up the original concept. I’m a tinkerer. I like to try new things and put cards into decks where they don’t generally belong just to see what would happen. I’m also extremely persistent. I don’t quit until I have a build that works. I accomplish this using a simple step-by-step method:

1)     Identify the key concept of the deck. This is where practice comes in. Build the deck you see in the Top 16 and play a few games with it. Find out what makes it tick. What are the key cards it needs to win? Every deck has a combination of cards it needs or an ideal situation it creates to claim victory. What is the engine?

2)     Understand the concept thoroughly. I’ve learned that there are a few general engines that a good deck employs in order to win: 1) a drawing engine (Destiny Draw/Destiny Hero - Disk Commander), 2) a destruction engine (Volcanic Rocket/Volcanic Shell/Blaze Accelerator), or 3) a combo engine (Diamond Dude Turbo or Demise OTK). When you understand the type of engine that powers each deck, then you can answer the question, “How can I use this differently?”

3)     Use the engine with different cards. This is tricky. Some engines are very specific to particular cards, such as the Destiny Hero draw engine or the Zombie combo engine. The trick to making an innovative deck is to borrow an engine and apply it to another set of cards to see if it works. If not, then try different cards. If that doesn’t work, then replicate that engine with a different set of variables.

Being an innovative deckbuilder has nothing to do with being good at deckbuilding. I’m not the best deckbuilder in the world, but I do have the persistence to tinker with something until it works the way I like it. I take one concept and apply to a different archetype or monster family and see what I come up with. I encourage you to try this method: it won’t disappoint you.

Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful holiday season! 

—Bryan Camareno