All the skills required to play this game well can be broken down into one of two categories: deckbuilding and in-game tactics. All the things I’ve talked about thus far (with the exception of the various uses and misuses of Enemy Controller) have dealt very specifically with things you need to be able to do in-game in order to be successful in today’s competitions. Today, I want to shift focus back to the deckbuilding side of the equation and address a few issues you should keep in mind when you’re creating decks.
The first is the strategy your deck is meant to employ. How are you trying to win the game? If your answer to this is no more specific than, “Take the other guy’s life points to 0,” you probably need to take a step back and look at what you’re doing. Perhaps you’re trying to bring a specific high-level monster out to terrorize the field, or maybe you’re trying to defeat your opponent with burn cards. Decks based around burn are different than those based around Ancient Gear Golem which are, in turn, different than decks based around Monarchs. Knowing exactly how you expect to accomplish a win is the first thing you need to figure out before you go piling cards into a deck. In the homework from last time, the deck in question was built to remove every card the opponent gets from play. Obviously this would include all the monsters that he or she wants to use to try and take you out, and without them, your monsters are then free to go to town on the opponent’s life points. The homework asked you to rank a list of cards from most useful to least useful in this deck. For those of you who may have missed it, here’s the list again:
Degenerate Circuit
Offerings to the Doomed
D. D. Scout Plane
D.D. Borderline
D.D. Survivor
Dimension Distortion
Grand Convergence
D.D. Warrior
Sangan
Banisher of the Radiance
Magician of Faith
Treeborn Frog
Bottomless Trap Hole
Dimensional Inversion
The main thing I want to talk about this week is a method of evaluating cards based on whether they directly contribute to your strategy, conditionally contribute to your strategy, or conflict with your strategy. My list up there happens to contain multiple cards that fall into each of these categories, and the point of the homework was to see if people could correctly distribute them into these categories, even if they didn’t quite consciously know what the categories were. In general, the highest ranked cards should be the ones that directly contribute to your strategy, and the lowest ranked cards would be those that conflict. Spread around in the middle range would then be the ones that only conditionally help you out. Overall, I was very pleased with how this one turned out. Those who responded almost universally put Banisher of the Radiance at the head of their lists, as well they should have. Banisher accomplishes everything you’ve set out to do as long as it remains face up on the field, and it does so as a 1600 ATK monster that can take full advantage of the empty field your opponent will frequently be left with. Other cards that were frequently seen near the top of the list included D.D. Survivor due to its favorable interactions with all the main cards that remove everything from play and D.D. Warrior for being able to remove any monster from play regardless of whether or not you have a continuous effect removing monsters from play.
The middle of the list is where things started to get interesting. This is the place where the conditionally useful cards would go—with the exception of a couple that could easily be considered very useful or not worth it at all. This is where cards like Degenerate Circuit, Grand Convergence, and Sangan were most often seen. Grand Convergence was generally on the high end of the middle range—sometimes sneaking into the top 4—and that makes a lot of sense given that it’s a powerful companion card to Macro Cosmos (which is hard to leave out of this type of deck). Still, Grand Convergence doesn’t do you any good at all if you don’t already have a Macro Cosmos face up on the field, and that makes it conditional. By the same token, this was where I was expecting to see D.D. Survivor to appear as well, given that without any sort of removal agent on the field, the card’s only value to you is its ATK. An interesting comparison to make would be to see how many people put D.D. Survivor high on their list and D.D. Scout Plane in the mid-to-low range when both cards essentially do the same thing.
The real surprise for me was the number of people who actually rated Degenerate Circuit as highly useful in this type of deck without any further information beyond the deck’s purpose. Rating Grand Convergence high makes sense to me because you’re almost guaranteed to be playing its companion card. Degenerate Circuit, on the other hand, is much more difficult to work with. You have to actually dedicate a lot of the space that you would use for monster removal to cards for bouncing monsters to the hand in order for Degenerate Circuit to be worthwhile. One reader (Zak Turchansky) actually took the time to explain how his list would change where these cards go based on any additional info given on this deck, which I found quite impressive.
Finally, we come to the cards that directly conflict with your strategy. Treeborn Frog is the headliner on this list, since it’s beyond completely worthless in this particular deck. Either it’s going to get removed from play, or it isn’t going to be able to come back due to a spell or trap on your side of the field that’s currently removing everything from play. Frog was almost universally at or near the absolute bottom of the list with the exception of a few people who thought that Frog and Sangan were the two most useful cards in the deck. Equating a card that is good with a card that is good in every deck is a pitfall that we definitely want to avoid, so more on that later. Joining Frog at the bottom was Dimensional Inversion due to the fact that your effects are doing all the removing, even of your own cards. In fact, Dimensional Inversion would be much better suited for your opponent’s deck in this case. D.D. Borderline and Dimensional Distortion are both far too difficult to accommodate or use, so they both fell to the bottom of most lists as well.
All in all, almost everybody did well on this one, so here’s the scoring.
Scoring:
+3 points if you put Banisher of the Radiance at or near the very top.
+3 points if you put Treeborn Frog at or near the very bottom.
+3 points if you had D.D. Survivor, Degenerate Circuit, Grand Convergence, and Sangan floating around the middle. Putting Convergence closer to the top is fine, as is putting Degenerate Circuit towards the bottom. They shouldn’t be reversed though.
+1 point because it’s the season of giving.
Max Score: 10 points
The fact that there were people who rated Treeborn Frog and Sangan as the most useful cards for this deck makes it very clear that a distinction needs to be made between good cards and cards good for the situation. It’s true that there is a certain set of cards that almost everyone tends to use, regardless of the type of deck being made. Graceful Charity, Heavy Storm, Mystical Space Typhoon, Nobleman of Crossout, Ring of Destruction, Treeborn Frog, Sangan, Breaker the Magical Warrior, and Mirror Force all find their way into decks a lot more often than not. They aren’t, however, always necessary. In fact, sometimes they may actually harm you depending on the strategy you’ve decided to employ. I can’t imagine someone playing a stall deck that also contains Heavy Storm. It’s not very likely that a stall player will want to take his own cards off the field unless there was an impending demise level threat in the opponent’s spell and trap zones. That’s not likely to happen, especially during game 1, so while Heavy Storm is one of the best cards in the game it’s one of the worst for the deck. Another example would be Breaker the Magical Warrior in a Clockwork deck. Breaker is one of the best aggressive cards in the game, but Clockwork isn’t a particularly aggressive deck. You’re never going to attack with a Clockwork deck, regardless of whether you’re trying to win by Final Countdown or if you’re just going to sit there and wait for your opponent to run out of cards. You need to be able to judge when you should or shouldn’t play a given card regardless of its actual power level. Allow me to pose these questions for a bit of practice on the subject.
1. Your monster line-up is:
2 Cyber Dragon
2 Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive
1 Spirit Reaper
2 Gravekeeper’s Spy
1 Gravekeeper’s Spear Soldier
2 Strike Ninja
1 D. D. Warrior Lady
1 Exiled Force
1 Treeborn Frog
2 Zaborg the Thunder Monarch
1 Sangan
1 Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer
1 Mobius the Frost Monarch
1 Don Zaloog
1 Breaker the Magical Warrior
1 Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World
(a) Is Pot of Avarice a good choice for your deck given this monster line-up?
(b) If so, why? If not, why not?
Pot of Avarice is, in essence, a fair version of Pot of Greed. You can’t get the jump on your opponent just by having it in your starting hand. Quite the opposite in fact. Starting off with Pot of Avarice in your hand is like starting with only four cards (five after you draw). That’s why you have to consider your monster line-up very carefully in a deck where you plan on playing Avarice. Can you fill up your graveyard quickly? Will getting those monsters into the graveyard help you in any way other than fulfilling the requirement for Pot of Avarice? Do you have any use for the monsters once they’re in your graveyard? These are the kinds of questions you need to ask yourself before you just toss Pot of Avarice into your deck. Avarice obviously works best in strategies that make heavy use of recruiter monsters. After all, the only thing better than claiming your recruiter effects is shuffling them back into the deck to be reused, in addition to drawing two cards. It’s even more brutal when the recruiters in question are a pair of Apprentice Magician cards along with the Old Vindictive Magician and Magician of Faith you probably searched out. The above monster line-up has none of these things, and since the only ways people usually send their own monsters to the graveyard is through tributing and discarding to Graceful Charity, it isn’t likely that the rest of this deck will have spell or trap effects to get monsters to the graveyard faster.
Next, if we look to see whether there’s a reason for us to put monsters into the graveyard other than Pot of Avarice, we see a pair of Strike Ninja cards. Strike Ninja is an excellent card when played with the proper set-up, but the proper set-up requires us to have at least two Dark monsters in the graveyard at all times. This will be very hard to achieve in a deck that also tries to support Pot of Avarice, due to the fact that as soon as you draw and use one, the chances of the other being useful are slimmed down. To sum it up, no, we can’t fill the graveyard very fast, yes, getting the monsters there has a use other than to let us activate Avarice, and yes, our use for the monsters depends on them being in the graveyard. All of this points to Avarice being a bad idea in a deck with this monster line-up. For those of you wondering, this monster line-up is not something I just came up with on the fly. It’s actually a modernization of the monster line-up of a Top 8 deck from the March 25th Shonen Jump Championship in Long Beach. The original deck did contain Pot of Avarice. Its pilot did not win the tournament.
Scoring:
(a) +4 points if you said to not play Pot of Avarice
(b) +6 points if you properly explained why.
Max Score: 10 points
This next example is a bit more difficult to deliver a clear or concrete answer for. See what you make of this:
2. You’re playing a Mausoleum of the Emperor deck with three copies of the Mausoleum and a Terraforming (to make sure you get it more often than not). You’re also running eight non-Cyber Dragon high level monsters. About half of them are level 7 or 8, and none of them are Destiny Hero - Dasher. Your deck also has Call of the Haunted, Premature Burial, and Swords of Revealing Light. The question is, do you play Treeborn Frog in this deck?
The reason this is such a tough question is because Treeborn Frog has a strange dichotomy of attributes with regard to its effect on your deck. On the one hand, it bolsters your win condition of bringing down huge monsters with killer effects to swing for the game. On the other hand, it conflicts with the method we’ve chosen to go about doing this. A lot of this boils down to how you plan on managing your cards during a game. Are you going to drop Mausoleum as quickly as possible and just start pressing? If so, you probably aren’t going to want to have Treeborn Frog around. Mausoleum has a surprisingly long life on the field due to the fact that the opponent will often consider it as something he or she can benefit from as well. Thus, with the exception of the use of Heavy Storm, Mausoleum of the Emperor is likely to be around from the moment you drop it until the end of the game. In this case it would be like playing Treeborn Frog in a deck based on using three copies of Royal Decree to lock down the opponent’s traps . . . also known as a bad idea. Another thing to keep in mind is that you are playing Call of the Haunted, and these days it seems to stay on the field a lot longer than the monster it brings back.
If you plan on playing the deck a bit slower and maximizing your ability to stabilize the field at any given time, the reward for playing Frog may very well be worth the risk you take in playing it in a field spell-based deck. After all, you don’t have to play Mausoleum in an aggressive manner. You could simply hold it until you’re certain you’ll win the game when you play it and drop a monster. In this case, you would just need to keep in mind that Frog isn’t going to get you any free level 7 or 8 monsters, and given that you have about four of them, you’ll need to be careful. Really, either way could work just fine as long as you tailor your in-game tactics to suit the deck you’ve built. This just goes to show that there are often situations in deckbuilding where there is no definitively right or wrong answer, and only with experience and playtesting will you be able to figure out the answer that’s right for you.
Scoring:
+3 points for your yes or no answer as long as your explanation supports your given answer.
+7 points if your explanation is well-reasoned and mentions some of the reasons I gave.
If you ended up with full credit this week, great job as usual. If you missed the Pot of Avarice question, I would definitely encourage you to check out various monster line-ups from featured decks and Top 8 decks, and ask the questions from above to figure out if some of the seemingly odd card choices are actually justified. I would then recommend trying them out yourself to see if they work as well in practice as in theory. If you got less than full credit on the Frog question, I sincerely hope that it isn’t because you said yes and argued for no or vice versa. To find out exactly how much sense your explanation makes, I would pose the problem to a dueling friend and then give my explanation. Oftentimes explaining something to someone else is a good way to make sure you have a solid grasp of it yourself.
That’s going to do it for the School of Duel in 2006! If you’re in actual school yourself (like I am) you’ve probably got your hands full with exams of some sort, so definitely no homework. Enjoy your vacation, and until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!
Jerome McHale
jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu
THE SCHOOL OF DUEL WILL RETURN IN 2007