[AW] Intro to competitive dueling

In my short time playing Yu-Gi-Oh! I have come across many different types of players using a wide array of decks. But one thing I see a hell of a lot is people overextending. Now, for those of you who don’t know, overextending is basically when you commit too many cards to the field, be it spells/traps or monsters, sometimes, both. Now, although it’s not exactly a bad thing, it isn’t a good thing either. It all depends on when you choose to play these cards. The best choice will almost always be when you are aiming to win the game, break your opponent’s strategy or, at the very least, deal enough damage to put your opponent on the ropes. A bad time to overextend is on your first turn, just because you can set five spell and traps, doesn’t mean you should. You never know when your opponent might be holding a ‘Heavy Storm’ or something similar.

There are cards that have been designed to specifically counter overextension. Cards such as ‘Heavy Storm’, ‘Mirror Force’, ‘Flash of the Forbidden Spell’ and ‘Straight Flush’. When you overextend you reduce the size of your hand, thus reducing your possible options and ultimately sealing your own fate. If your hand is small you have less to work with, you are reduced to depending on your next draw, depending on one card, something that no one wants to work with.


That brings me to card advantage. Again, for those of you who don’t know what card advantage is I’ll explain: Card advantage is how many cards you have in your hand, opposed to how many cards your opponent has in their hand. It’s calculated not by the worth of a card but the potential worth of cards.
Let’s have a look at the banned card: Pot of greed.
Assuming you have 5 cards in your hand, including pot of greed. When you choose to play the spell you gain +1 card advantage. The reason for this is you lose one card in order to draw two thus gaining a net profit of one card.

Another good example is the popular trap card: Dark Bribe.
Dark Bribe, by itself is a card which causes a -1 to your card advantage. You lose a card, your opponent loses a card then they draw a card. However, the correct use of the card can cause your opponent to lose a valuable play which may have cost you considerably more. A good target for Dark Bribe is a card which your opponent has to discard for which would bring the card advantage lost and gained to 0: A fair trade off. Another good target would be cards which draw cards, Allure of Darkness, Destiny Draw, Solar Recharge, and Charge of the light brigade are all commonly played cards that are ideal targets to negate the loss of card advantage when playing dark bribe.


In short, card advantage is your potential options. If your opponent has more cards than you in their hand then chances are they have more options than you do. More options mean more potential counters to whatever you happen to play.

This brings me to: ‘reading a deck’. The one big disadvantage of running a well known deck is that your opponent will know what to wait for and will be able to set up defences accordingly. Making sure you have counters to the current Meta decks is your responsibility. If you know that your opponent is going to synchro summon sooner or later, keep a book of moon handy. If they summon a tuner you can knock it face down to stop the whole synchro process and potentially ruin t heir game plan. Knowing how to use your cards and how to play your cards are completely different things.

The cards you play should complement one another. If you don’t have cards who’s effects can chain with each other then you’re deck isn’t going to run smoothly. I know a lot of people like to run their favourite cards simply because they can but if you don’t build to support your chosen card then chances are it will hurt your entire deck. A great example of this is when someone tries to make a deck based on what they have seen in the anime. Those decks generally don’t work and will get walked all over by a deck built with a little forward planning.

Originally, when I started writing this I had planned to simply focus on overextending but as I got going I started bouncing about from one aspect of a TCG (trading card game) to another. I decided to keep this as it is, perhaps I’ll title it as an intro to competitive dueling. I will get around to going into more detail on what I skimmed over here.

I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you learned something new.

Grammar/Spelling: Almost perfect, but of course, I have skimmed through it again, (eg. topic title says "competetive" rather than competitive.) Also, capitalize card names, (eg. You wrote "pot of greed" rather than "Pot of Greed") Try to capitalize the titles in the topic first, to make it more "official." (-1)

Length/Content: Well, organization = good, though really, bold, underline, italicize the parts you think are important, or even color them to capture the eyes of the reader. (-1)
Fact: The brain can register things in color better.

Idea: Idea's unique overall, not that high like a strategy that has never been thought of, nor as low as a in-depth guide to stealing cards IRL. (+0)

Rating in total: 8/10 - 500 DC

Not bad for a first attempt. I'll pretty things up next time, I just bumped this one out right away.