Synergy

TL;DR? Go to “And Finally, the Conclusion” for a summary. ~TAC


I Show off to Slifers

There’s a problem that I see time and time again with the decks that inexperienced players show me, and it tends to end up with them getting ripped apart in a game and afterwards asking me - “How does my opponent always have all the outs to what I have!?” When I look at their decklists trying to help them, I then begin to see plenty of cards that seem to be thrown in just to address an extremely specific few cards that maybe their friends use or that they had trouble with in a rated match on DN. The issue, though, is that they keep throwing out pieces of their own deck in order to fight against other’s decks, and what their deck ends up being is a stack of thrown together cards built to counter others (often ineffectually) with little aggressive strategy of it’s own. It has no synergy.


What’s “Synergy”?


An overly fancy term- one you probably won’t ever hear in this context outside of this article honestly; but I’m using it to explain to you what we’re trying to accomplish here. We’re trying make our decks consist of cards that work in conjunction to execute a specific strategy that defeats our opponent. How’s that for a definition?

The thing is, it’s not as simple as having two cards that work together. We have to consider not drawing into key pieces of our deck, the ability to have our strategy follow through in the face of our opponent’s trap line-up, and how we’re able to stop an opponent’s strategy.


I Play 3 Lightning Vortex in Every Deck

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Before we can even begin, we have to decide what the hell it is we’re trying to achieve here. “What’s my strategy?” It sounds silly that I’d be asking this, but it’s actually not as clear cut as it seems. We can have a “main play” or a “key card”, but what if we don’t draw into one of our combo pieces? Can our deck still compete? Having a strategy lets you build your deck in such a way that even if you don’t draw into a power card, like Rescue Rabbit in Dino Rabbit decks, or Fire Formation - Tenki in Fire Fist, that you’re still able to compete in the game because your deck is built with a theme and still works together. We have to be able to rely on our strategy, and be able to reach into it almost every game.


What are some good examples of what a strategy looks like, then?


Frog Monarchs use a large amount of card effects that remove monsters, thereby keeping the opponent from keeping large monsters on the field for a long time.
Mermails use monsters that search more monsters from their deck, allowing them to apply constant pressure on their opponent until they buckle at the knees, or lose because they can’t respond to a large monster swarm.
HERO Anti-Meta (also known as LIGHT Beat HEROs)plays a large amount of cards that disrupt common plays, keeping opponents from effectively making large plays. Their HERO monsters tend to follow the theme of punishing the opponent for playing removal effects on them. (Elemental Hero The Shining recovers 2 monsters and Elemental Hero Alius regenerates advantage with Gemini Spark and Hero Blast.

What are some bad strategies?


An Arcanite Magician deck that attempts to use Arcanite Magician’s effect to clear the opponent of their field.
A deep draw deck that attempts to use the effect of Heart of the Underdog to draw a large amount of cards- without a way to keep from getting slapped by the hand limit.

I Keep Losing to Torrential Tribute


Unfortunately, having a strategy simply isn’t enough. Backrow is quite plentiful in Yu-Gi-Oh!, and often times decks are made unplayable simply because of how easily they are crippled by an opponent’s disruption. The decks that get hit the worst are ones that rely on spending three or more cards from their hand to get a combo play into effect. While they can create some of the most devastating plays in the game, they are also the most trivially easy to stop, often causing the player using them to lose almost instantaneously as soon as they spot a Bottomless Trap Hole or Effect Veiler.

The issue becomes that most decks have a strategy, and in a card game like this there is always a counter-strategy - and it’s often in the main deck of others, if not the side deck. The solution to this is a two-step process which is rather tricky.

We first need to identify what it is that hard counters our deck. Often, decks, especially the popular ones in competitive play, can counter strategies by simply altering the way they play to make sure they can throw a tack onto your chair making the next guy you put on the field run away with his hands over his ass.

You should be able to find this pretty quickly by playing a few games with the deck. Often times though, you’ll find that aggressive decks and decks that focus on getting a particular boss monster out will be hit considerably harder by traps on your opponent’s side of the field. Conservative control decks are often wrecked by monsters that can protect themselves and decks that can generate card advantage without a successful summon. Some decks just need time; time to float into all their pieces and keep the opponent from killing them in one turn until they can drop a large wave of monsters.

Whatever it is, the issue next becomes “how do I solve this weakness?” This is possibly the hardest part of deckbuilding, as throwing in a couple traps is often not nearly enough to solve it. When you choose out the cards to help your deck follow through with it’s strategy, one of the most important things to consider is how often you’ll be able to use your card of choice. You need to choose cards that can deal with many different kinds of threats, and are generally versatile- one of the best examples of this is Forbidden Lance.

Forbidden Lance plays such an important role in Dino Rabbits because it allows the deck to protect it’s precious boss monsters, the Evolsaurs, but also allows it to use it’s otherwise small monsters like Jurrac Guaiba to defeat problematic monsters your opponent controls. It’s live with nearly every monster in the deck, because it can be used offensively and defensively, and guards against any spell or trap that’s played against the deck.

But most importantly, Forbidden Lance can be used in any game state. When you’re losing, Forbidden Lance turns things around. When you’re winning, Forbidden Lance protects your field and keeps you winning. A lot of cards have the flaw of only working when you’re losing or winning, like Robbin’ Goblin, which only has the chance to trigger when you’re in an already winning game state, or Damage Condenser, which only works when you’re losing monsters and taking likely heavy battle damage. While these can be powerful cards, you may find that more often than not you’ll wish they were something else, or that you don’t need them.


I Fill my Deck With Jar of Greed


Strategy formation and execution, check. Strategy protection, check. And, I still have 8 deck slots open. What do we fill it up with? I’d like to point out that we need to once again revert back to looking at our strategy. What sort of cards can we use to make our advantages harder to negate through counter strategies, and what can we use to keep ourselves in the game? This is where the metagame of your playing environment comes into play- no, not necessarily that everyone is going to be playing Mermails. We need to identify what will most likely be the most common decks we face when we play will be; this is a small ratio of the deck, but using cards that can give you an advantage over common decks, especially the ones that give you the most trouble, can be a powerful asset.

A well-timed Fiendish Chain can shut down an opponent’s Evilswarm Ophion. A devastating Royal Decree can lock down opponents with Naturia Beast. Revealing a Maxx “C” can make a Mermail player think twice before continuing their combo. Pay attention to the people you play with- entire Yugioh Championship Series tournaments have been won by players like Tyler Tabman who made good predictions about what his opponents were going to play.


And Finally, the Conclusion


Here’s what we’re going to do. Rip apart your deck. Take out everything that isn’t strictly necessary, that you don’t absolutely need. Take out Dark Hole. Take out Monster Reborn. We’re looking at the core of the deck, the monsters and spells that name the deck before anything else even exists. We also want to cut out on copies of cards that you don’t need. If you don’t need to open it every single opening game, it should not be at 3. This is your skeleton. Everything in your deck will be strictly in relation to this set of cards.

Here’s where we put in the star players that aren’t strictly necessary for the deck to function. Cards like Deep Sea Diva in Mermails, Cardcar D in Chain Burn, and Light and Darkness Dragon in Frog Monarchs. These cards help your point get across, but you have the ability to cut them out if the meta makes them bad cards to use.

And now we put in the counter cards. Checks to opponent’s cards that can stop your deck, and cards that we can use to screw with opposing strategies. We made a good deck. Hurray. Go give your friend a high five now and beat them. Not physically, of course.


And now, a letter from the author:
Thanks for reading. I know a lot of you (by which I mean all of you) must be wondering who the hell I am. I’m a friend of Tai’s actually, and an over-opinionated writer for my school newspaper (I actually write useless drivel opinion articles, but the point is that I generally enjoy writing, until I have the nervous breakdown considering how well recieved my writing will be.)
Tai told me about his teaching at the Academy, so I looked into his “Synergy” article myself- at which time I realized that while it had good intentions and some good reasonings behind it, the lesson that he wrote may be misleading (Raw percentages really only do good in very select cases.) I decided to correct this issue by writing my own prolonged, verbose drivel on the subject to hopefully learn you why some cards are just plain bad in Yu-Gi-Oh!, y’all.
My attempts, at both teaching useful information and humor, are questionable in quality, so if you have any questions (except for explaining terrible jokes), please do leave them below. If you have comments, or think this was useless- hey, what the hell, critique is often more helpful in learning than praise.
As for anything concerning this “homework” I hear about, I think it’s a waste of time, but Tai told me it’s mandatory so I’ll think about it. So, you can do a video or something about it I guess, as I do enjoy seeing Blazer Slater’s hat, which is arguably more entertaining than Tai losing several matches straight against Kyonaru (By the way, the guy is a hoss); I actually applied in order to start the “BS Hat Fan Club”, but was unfortunately turned down on the grounds of unclear implications and non-membership within the forums.
PS: In case you’re wondering, the word count on this is 2,070 words. The average adult reads at 250 wpm, so I’ve wasted approximately 8 minutes of your time if you read this without stopping...Who am I kidding, it’s probably closer to half an hour with the clarity of this post.
Sincerely, The Average Cabbage