One of the more difficult questions I have to field from upcoming players is "how do I improve my game?" Most players feel they have a pretty strong grasp of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG and practice on a consistent basis to keep their skills up. Most of the time I can’t tell them anything other than to practice more and keep imitating the strategies that win tournaments. Fortunately my second column here on Metagame.com gives me the means to point out specific plays that let tournament winners succeed.
Today I’m going to introduce a play that has no name. It’s more of a style really: a technique used by many top duelists. The idea is that by not committing too much to the field, you can build up a toolbox of weapons from your hand. If you can press the game enough to force your opponent to put a lot of cards on the table and sweep them up in one turn, you’ll be in a great position to win. Of course in order to achieve this, you have to not lose the game in the meantime, and be able to use the cards you’ve saved up.
Most of the time, the sweep will be a setup play. These days it’s not too difficult to play Dark Armed Dragon and sweep the opponent’s field clean. But back in the day, this used to be a difficult task to accomplish and doing so won games. Being able to sweep your opponent’s field early in the game meant you usually didn’t have to worry about losing. In 2006, Kyle Duncan convincingly won Shonen Jump Championship Philadelphia without losing a single match. His strategy was the same every time: deal with what the opponent had on the field to keep him or her off of it.
You can see in his feature matches that Kyle’s plays were always geared toward clearing as much of the field as possible. "Kyle Duncan played Heavy Storm—destroying two spell or trap cards—summoned Mystic Tomato to attack Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive, and cleared out another monster with Tomato’s search target." That type of sentence appears multiple times in the matches that Jason covered, and surely happened countless times throughout the tournament.
Another player who consistently displays this approach to the game is Paul Levitin. His Shonen Jump antics with Robbin’ Goblin and Gladiator Beasts are perfect examples of his belief in this philosophy. Robbin’ Goblin is meant to cripple the opponent’s hand as well as his or her field, and Gladiator Beasts function in similar fashion to Monarchs—that is to say they can deal with multiple problems at once.
We can see Paul’s field-sweeping setups in his feature match with Anthony Duke from the recent Shonen Jump Championship Minneapolis. The moves Duke made put him in a position few players can climb out of. He had Destiny Hero - Plasma with Paul’s Sangan attached, plus Jinzo and Dark Grepher on the field. This meant that Paul was without traps and monster effects and was staring down enough ATK power that all three monsters had to be dealt with this turn. Luckily, he had planned for such a situation and was ready to perform the sweep. First he played Soul Taker to destroy Plasma and get his Sangan search. He was then able to use Gladiator Beast effects thanks to Test Tiger and an attack on a Sheep Token. A pair of Gladiator Beast Murmillo cards later and Duke had no monsters left.
However, a lot more thought went into this play than you may initially suspect. Duke had revealed the Plasma with his Elemental Hero Stratos’s effect and Paul knew he would have to be able to sweep the field on the turn Plasma came down. The effects of Plasma meant that Duke would make as many attacks as possible. As such, Paul would be down in life points so much that clearing only some of the monsters would be no good. There needed to be a clean sweep, and Paul baited Duke into falling for it.
What Paul did was set three spell or trap cards and a monster, in an effort to make Duke anticipate that the set monster would be Morphing Jar. Levitin believed that Duke would then play his Plasma to take care of the Jar, which turned out to be Sangan. Paul made the plays and things went exactly as he thought they would: Paul mitigated the damage from Plasma and forced his opponent into making the play. From there Duke decided to take advantage of the open field by pressing with Jinzo and another monster. This was a good play, since it would force Paul into a do-or-die situation, but this was exactly the trap Paul was hoping Duke would fall into.
I’ll finish this piece off with a personal anecdote from Shonen Jump Championship Boston. I was watching Paul Levitin play a fun match with his Robbin’ Goblin theme deck, and he pulled off what has to be the most devastating turn I’d witnessed. He began the duel with a simple set card to each zone. His opponent summoned a monster and attacked into Levitin’s Apprentice Magician, who Paul replaced with another Apprentice. His opponent then set a pair of cards to his back row and Paul was up. What occurred next is now referred to as "the turn."
Paul summoned Breaker the Magical Warrior and used his effect to destroy a set trap card. He flip-summoned Apprentice Magician to give Breaker another spell counter, using it to immediately to destroy the second card his opponent had in the spell and trap zone. Creature Swap came down next to trade the Apprentice for the opponent’s attack-mode monster. Paul then flipped Robbin’ Goblin, attacked his own Apprentice to search out Magician of Faith, and attacked directly with Breaker. The result was the loss of the opponent’s monster, both spell and trap cards, and two cards from his hand. Paul lost nothing on the exchange, replacing the Apprentice and the Swap with two different monsters.
Achieving a clean sweep is definitely not easy. It takes patience and (most importantly) experience to know when the time is right to storm the opponent’s entire field.
—Matt Peddle