There’s a universal rule that states: 20% of what you do accounts for 80% of your success. This is known as the 80/20 Rule, and you can apply it to pretty much everything. 20% of the players will get 80% of the rewards, prizes, and National Qualifications. 20% of your testing team will account for 80% of the results, decklists, and breakthroughs. It’s just how things work. You can’t fight this. Even if you decide to make a team of all the best players and weed out the eighty-percenters who do nothing, you’ll end up having 20% your best players getting 80% of the results. You have to work with this rule.

No metagame on the planet violates the 80/20 rule. I don’t care if you only play online. To think that your metagame is too intelligent, too sophisticated, or too free-thinking is a very expensive train of thought. You’ll usually find yourself wasting a lot of time and money collecting losses with that type of thinking. Every metagame follows this rule. 20% of the players will do 80% of the winning. 80% of the players will be running the same type of deck or the deck that won the most recent major competition. Don’t think that your metagame is any different

The best thing, I’ve found, is to take advantage of the mediocre 80%. No matter what the metagame, your fellow duelists will follow this same pattern. There are multiple ways to “take advantage” of the 80% of duelists who will run some variation of the same deck you’ve seen win the latest major competition. Not that competitive Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG play can be so trivialized that it will turn out that way all the time, it’s just that you will come across this very often. You will find many, many, many Apprentice/Monarch decks in this new format.

You have to ask yourself, “If I didn’t want to think for myself and create a deck that fits my style, tastes, and abilities, what would I play?”

Every competition will follow this ratio. So, the million-dollar question becomes: how do I become part of the twenty-percenters and get out of the eighty-percenters group?

The answer to that question lies within the individual duelist: you. Your job as a duelist is to find what your key constraints are. What is it about you that stops you from improving in this game? 80% of the reasons why you are not doing better than you are now lie within you.

The rest are outside of your control:

—Format changes.

—Caliber of players.

—Amount of high-caliber players (players who are far more skilled than you).

—How many players have Crush Card Virus in their main deck.

—How many players have Gold Sarcophagus in their main deck.

That list is just a partial one, and is in no way complete. There’s no sense fussing over things that you can’t control. Once you become aware of what you can’t control, it’s time to go to work on what you can control. I can give you an example from my own experience. I’ve looked back at what factors gave me the biggest “edge” in the past. One of big ones was preparation. I got significantly better results from being fully prepared for the event at least a week in advance: deciding on a deck (and the sleeves), completing my travel arrangements, and even packing my dice in advance. If I have not filled out my “preparation checklist,” I will not go to the event. It’s not like I don’t allow for some snags here and there, but I do not want to be “ready” the night before: I want to be “ready” at least one week before the event so I can place my full concentration on playing.

When your mind is cluttered with worries and frustrations about not having the right travel directions, not bringing any food, not bringing any money, etc., then you won’t be able to concentrate very well. You need to have this stuff figured before you set foot outside your door. I even have checklists for my designated testing sessions. Anybody can sit down and play the game for four hours straight and call it “testing,” but you’re not really testing unless you are trying to derive a specific result from the time you spend.

For you, it may be that you simply don’t practice enough. The act of practicing itself is necessary. How productive those practices can be is up to you. Ask specific questions. Ask for opinions. Develop your own conclusions.

Perhaps you may be too nervous when it comes to competitions. Knowing this about yourself, what is the next step? Go to more competitions. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose. Just go to more tournaments and get used to that type of environment.

Here’s another exercise for you. Take a blank sheet of paper and write this question at the top: what are the key constraints that keep me from doing better? Take a good look at yourself and write down the answer to that question. Then go to work on those constraints.

When you go to work on the 80% of the reasons that reside within you, you will find that your results will improve almost instantly. For example, now that I fully prepare for an event, I have dramatically improved my tournament results. Taking those 15-30 minutes of my time to go down my “preparation checklist” and complete each item equals satisfactory tournament results to me. How much is that worth to me? Emotionally? Achievement-wise? Monetarily? No matter how you slice it, it’s worth a whole lot. I have more factors I work and I don’t have them all nailed yet, but this is a real-life example to show that this actually works. Try it.  

More on the 80/20 Rule and Metagame Prediction

The premise behind my way of “predicting” the metagame (or at least that 80% chunk of it) relies on these four questions:

1) What is/are the most popular deck(s)?

2) How does this deck win?

3) How does this deck lose?

4) How can I improve this deck?

The first three are givens. You should be “in the know” enough to realize what the most popular decks are or are going to be. All you have to know is what everyone is talking about. And by “everyone,” I mean the forums, your peers, the top-level players, etc. You need to know how these decks win, and more importantly, how they lose.

The next question is the key: how can I improve these decks? It’s completely backwards, and probably goes against everything you’ve learned about winning in this game. You have to envision yourself as the previous winner of the latest major competition. You won the tournament. Now you need to improve the deck based on its strengths and weaknesses or scrap it completely. If you honestly expect to win at the next event with the same exact build, you’re in for a nasty surprise. Being the bright person that you are, you decide to improve the deck because you don’t want to attribute your losses to being lazy.

This is how you should think. For every deck that you copy from the Top 8 of the latest event, you should think of yourself as the original architect of that deck. Assume that your responsibility is to improve your latest creation because it will be heavily copied and players will be prepared for it at the next tournament.

Knowing how you would improve this deck gives you a very specific “edge” against the rest of your competition. This “edge” has two parts. On one hand, you’ll probably be one of the only duelists out of the 500 or so in your area who will actually do this. On the other hand, you have improved the deck and compensated for its weaknesses. Now you can side deck against this improved version because you will know, from experience, how it loses. You are now one step ahead of your specific metagame.

Remember: just because a large number of people will read this article does not mean that they will all listen to it. I’d guess that 80% of the people who read this won’t even try any of these ideas. Those 80% will come up with some excuse for why these methods won’t work, all of which will be made without trying the advice out in real life. The 20% who do will be the ones who benefit the most just by trying. If you want to be a part of the 20%, try it out. You can even put your own twist on it.

The important thing is that you actually do it.

—Bryan Camareno