Deck Building 101

Hey everyone-- Sorry I've been bad about posting lately. Last week was Thanksgiving and I ended up picking up an extra shift at work, so I had less time to write than I would have liked. I decided to come back with a strategy article/guide for players who have difficulty with deck building, I hope you'll find this helpful!

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One of the most difficult, yet rewarding, parts of a TCG takes place before players sit down at a tournament. The single most defining moment to determine your success and failure at said tournament happens before you draw your opening hand or unroll your playmat. It happens at home in front of piles of neatly lain cards or sitting at a computer making tweaks on a crudely edited notepad document as you keep swapping the number of Effect Veiler's between two and three. The most important part of any tournament is building a deck you can expect to succeed with.

When you play this game for any amount of time, it's easy to take for granted the challenges that building and modifying a deck presents for newer players. Sometimes it's hard for the newer players to grasp why cards like Sangan are usually preferred over cards like Alexandrite Dragon, or why Agent decks usually skip Sanctuary in the Sky when it's built to support them. You can try many times to explain what an engine is or how ineffective field spells may be in a meta with multiple Mystical Space Typhoons and Heavy Storm, but you're more likely to confuse someone than teach them anything. The key to success in anything, especially deck building, is practice. This is true deck building just like it is in playing the game. But with a game as vast and long running as Yu-gi-oh, it can be overwhelming in the beginning, so I've created a few guidelines for deck building to help new players, and hopefully provide some tips and insight to current players.

Find Your Deck
Before you approach the challenge of building a new deck you must first know what you are trying to achieve. Is there a specific archetype you are trying to build around? A specific card? A specific goal? Every deck you build you are building to win games-- it is fun to include your favorite cards in your deck, but adding three copies of Kagemusha of the Blue Flame to your deck is likely not going to lead to success in a major event. You need to know what you are trying to achieve, and put cards around it that help you achieve that goal.

Knowing your goal will help you narrow down the types of cards you are using in your deck. Are you building around the Chaos archetype? You will need to choose light and dark monsters. Do you want to successfully summon Tiras, Keeper of Armageddon? You will need to find ways to quickly summon level five monsters. Are you trying to win with Final Countdown? You will need to choose effective stall cards to keep your strategy live. Once you know where to look, you can move on to the next phase of deck building.

Research the Deck
Researching is most easily done when you have a specific archetype to work with. If you wanted to play, for an example, Infernities, it's important that you first know what Infernities have to offer. What role does Infernity Archfiend play? What does Infernity Randomizer do? How do specific Infernity traps affect the decks chance for survival? Reading up on the cards that are part of the archetype will help you to understand the goals the deck will attempt to achieve and help you to find which cards are actually worth seeing play in your deck. If you are just starting the game, building off a specific archetype is one of the easier ways to get started in deck building.

The best deck, however, is not always a deck based off a specific a specific archetype. These decks are usually based off an idea more than an archetype, attribute, or monster type. Most people who have played the game for any period of time are aware of "good stuff" decks. This deck takes different forms from meta to meta, from discard decks running Delinquent Duo, Confiscation, and Forceful Sentry, to Morph Control using Metamorphosis with Scapegoat and a slew of chaos monsters, to the modern day deck we know as "plant" synchro (or synchrocentric.) These decks used monsters ranging from different types and attributes with different effects and engines, but they were successful. It's hard to create a deck like this from scratch; most people don't become aware of them until after they see them win on a consistent basis. It takes a strong knowledge of the game and card pool to understand which cards work together and with the meta, and how to properly supplement them to be successful, but it is an outlet to be truly creative in this game.

See How It's Done
This will often take on the name of "net-decking" and in Yu-gi-oh it has a very dirty connotation. In actuality, I see nothing wrong with finding successful builds of a specific deck and adapting it for your purposes. This is, of course, assuming you can look at a deck and understand why card choices were made, what the deck was trying to achieve, and how to properly play an opening hand. I do not advocate finding the top deck from the most recent YCS, copying the deck card for card, and running out to your local tournament to show off how great your google skills are-- Instead I suggest you use the experience of players before you so that you can understand certain card choices in a deck and how one archetype can work to achieve different goals. By seeing and understanding other peoples decks you can take what you like, leave what you don't, and attempt a creation that is uniquely yours.

Play Testing: Part 1
It is a good idea at this point to playtest some of the decks you see on Dueling Network if you want to see how they run or are supposed to work. It's always a good to have working knowledge about how you're supposed to play certain cards or how they flow together than assuming how many of each card you should be fitting into your deck. Some players get really caught up in the idea of running three-ofs certain cards like Thunder King Rai-Oh or Effect Veiler, only two find out that one or two should be plenty in their final draft.

Get Feedback
Having found the deck you want to play, researched the parts that make it work, seen successful builds, and hopefully play tested a few of them to see how they flow, you can begin the process of building your own version of the deck. It's easy, especially the first time you build a deck, to start tossing in three of every card in an archetype and forget important things like Dark Hole or Monster Reborn. Always ask yourself when choosing cards for a deck "Why does this card benefit this deck?" The Agent of Force - Mars does not fit into the modern ideas of what an Agent deck is, do not get tricked into surrendering precious deck space to it because it happens to share a naming structure with the other cards in your deck. After your deck list is compiled you should hit up popular forums like Pojo, Duelist Groundz, or Dueling Network. From here you can post your version of a deck and hopefully receive some feedback from other players. You do not have to take every idea that people present to you but be prepared to be open to drastic structural changes to the deck as well as defend to the last word every single card in the deck. A dissenting voice is welcome if it's constructive, and getting a community of people behind your idea (or even just a small playtest group) will only make you stronger.

Play Testing: Part 2
This time around you have ideally come to the table with a deck you have built from a blank slate. Your deck may be very similar to another deck you've seen, but at this point you will understand card choices, have made minor adjustments to fit your play style, or possibly completely rethought a popular archetype to be uniquely yours. Either way, you have crafted the deck and it needs testing, you will want to find wider varieties of players, you'll probably bring this to local tournaments and (again) test on dueling network against lots of opponents.

You will complete the last two steps over and over until your either win a major event or decide to play a new deck and start over from the beginning. These are the steps I generally follow when I approach new decks and I feel that these are good guidelines for anyone when they approach a new deck. It's important, however, to be aware of two things when building a deck.

Experience > Deck List
Deck building is a huge part of the game. Billy Brake playing a Fifty-five Card Exodia Burn will likely lose to a novice playing his YCS Columbus deck. But on that same note, you can't build a deck you see on the web and expect to win with it as is against more experienced players with the same deck. It's important to build and understand other player’s decks, play with the ratios, and get a feel for the cards, but it's important to remember that the deck is yours. If you feel more comfortable running two Maxx "C"'s than three, you should run two. You have to enjoy your deck and you have to play cards that you know work for you. Only through practice and repetition will you understand card choices, and you should use that experience to tailor the deck for your own style.

Know Your Limitations
Not everyone can play every deck. To put it simply, not every deck can fit your style or your capacity. Sometimes, this is corrected with experience-- newer players will have a difficult time grasping the finesse of a synchrocentric deck but will have no problem playing a deck like Heroes. When you're a new player, you need to grow into your own play style, and when you're an advanced player you need to adapt a deck for a style that suits your skill. I have a friend who recently returned to the game who only ever played casually. Concepts like chaining, special summoning, and priority are fairly foreign to him. Furthermore, he has financial restrictions, so many of his cards are very dated. I recently helped tailor a deck for him, based primarily on beating down opponents with high power low level monsters. For the time being, it works for him, and as he begins to understand the game by playing against my other friends he will understand which cards are useful and adapt them for his own deck. You can't force maturity into a person, it has to happen naturally, and this applies both in real life and in gaming. To fully understand a game you have to play it, so you should play it the way you understand, and adapt as your understanding of the game changes.

Of course knowing your limitations also falls under the umbrella of budget. Rabbit Laggia may be the coolest deck you've ever seen, but if you don't have the cards, or the six-hundred some odd dollars it will take to make it, you need to set your aims elsewhere. You can always play decks like these on Dueling Network and over time work towards them, but it is better to build a deck you know you can play an enjoy than complain "I'd be unstoppable if I only had..." You really just end up making excuses for yourself. No matter who you are you are playing with a set of limitations, it's more important that you learn to work with them and grow, than it is to stay stagnant and make excuses for why you can't win.

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Thank you all for reading. As a quick personal note, I'd like to congratulate Whitney Carter on successfully completing the NaNoWriMo challenge. She's been working for a long time on concepts and characters for her novel, and in just one month she was able to write a 50,000+ word first draft. If any of you are writers or interested in fantasy writing, you should defiantly check out her blog, Invisible Ink.