4.15.04  Hope everyone had a Happy Easter. Also, I’d like to thank everyone who emailed and IMed me. I got at least a dozen, and I was surprised how many Duel Masters fans the site actually has.

While thinking up the follow up article I should do to my Nature/Dark Control deck, which I’ll be playing religiously for the next month or so, I decided to stick to basic strategies of the game, rather than good decks to play. The reason why is the next set is supposed to become legal on May 7^th, and the game will change drastically after that.

In the replies I got from people, I realized that many of you have very different views on the game. In all honesty, that’s one of the things I love about this game, and games in general in their early days. The game always has some similarities to others like it, but you have to play it differently and look outside the box. It also might give you an alternate way of viewing the other games you play and give you a look at it no one else has the opportunity to.

I do think that there are some similarities that just follow through. One of the most dominant are deck types. Magic, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and many others have archetypes that seem to follow themes in which the deck is designed. While each separate deck goes about a different way of winning, they can be classified in one or more of three ways: An Aggro deck, a Combo deck, or a Control deck.

If you’re the Aggro deck, you’ll be using the strategy of beating down your opponent fast and efficiently. Your creatures will probably grow as the game progresses. Decks like this will usually enter top deck mode most often, just simply playing whatever they happen to pull off the top. An example of the Aggro deck is something like this:

Turn 1- Mana, Deadly Fighter Braid Claw

Turn 2- Mana, Burning Mane or Crimson Hammer

Turn 3- Mana, Golden Wing Striker

Turn 4- Mana, Rothus the Traveler…

You just play creatures, simple removal spells here and there to deal with what your opponent has, and beat down. You try to keep up with creature quality as the game progresses, while still having a play each turn. The only cards you might hold are creature removal spells. The plays you make with your removal have to be nicely timed, and correctly targeted, otherwise it could cost you the game. You basically just want to overwhelm them before they get breathing room to respond to your threats.

The best way to build the deck is to make it 80% fast and efficient stuff for turn 1-4 plays, and a few bombs for mid-late game. One nice thing about Duel Masters is you have more room for late-game bombs because you can always play them as mana early on.

Combo decks revolve around a specific combination of cards you have. The combo will usually net you the game, if not a very unstoppable, hard to lose situation. Combo decks will usually fully utilize tutor cards that search out a specific card or type of card from the deck. Here’s what the Combo deck would look like:

Turn 1- Mana

Turn 2- Mana, Poisonous Mushroom, Mana, Pangaea’s Song

Turn 3- Mana, Explosive Fighter Ucarn

Turn 4- Bronze Arm Tribe

This particular deck is based around getting a fast Explosive Fight Ucarn as you can see. The deck can win without the Combo coming out, but usually has no game aside from their powerhouse bomb or combo after that. Most combo decks will have some sort of backup plan, but certain decks packed with hate spells will just annihilate them. While Combo decks don’t often see heavy tournament play, a few do make the scene, sometimes as tier 1 decks. A good example would be Magical Scientist + Catapult Turtle in Yu-gi-Oh!, or Illusions-Donate back in Extended Magic.

Control decks give up the early game for the late game. They don’t start getting aggressive until they can successfully deal with nearly anything their opponent can play. Most of their early game plays will involve self-defense or board clearing effects until they can use their larger, more powerful creatures and spells to decimate their opponent. They often times will try to mass cards in their hand through cantrip spells and effects, gaining card advantage, which is crucial in the long game. The Control plays would go a little something like this:

Turn 1: Mana

Turn 2: Mana, Hunter Fish

Turn 3: Mana, Aqua Hulcus

Turn 4: Mana, Brain Serum

Turn 5: Mana, Teleportation

While Aqua Hulcus is a creature that can attack, the rest of the plays are all about clearing the field. You can see they don’t intend on winning solely with Aqua Hulcus, but do intend on disrupting the opponent long enough until they can put a large threat on the field.

Control decks will also attempt to lock your opponent. There are various ways of entering locks. You could lock your opponent out of keeping a creature on the field, due to creature kill or bounce, lock them out of playing spells, lock them out of attacking, even locking them out of drawing a card. Control decks want to control the game, pure and simple.

Unfortunately, in Duel Masters, it won’t always be so cut and dry. It’s not like seeing two islands untapped and thinking twice before playing a spell, or seeing a turn 2 Mongrel and hoping to topdeck the Smother before it gets out of hand. Since you’re playing with such a limited card pool, and there’s no real tier list of decks yet, it might be hard to tell your opponent’s initial strategy by the first few cards. There are subtle clues to look for.

If your opponent is playing small creatures early on and swinging as often as possible, the deck is probably meant to be aggressive. If the deck defends early on, and has some forms of creature removal, it’s most likely Control. If the deck has mana acceleration, and the cards seem to have synergy with each other a lot, or search for key cards, it’s probably going to be Combo.

There’s also differences in the way people play that could actually net you an advantage and help you determine what deck you should play. And if you’re keen on it, you can catch it while they’re playing. This past Wednesday we had our weekly Duel Masters tournament. Round 2, my opponent had a Fire/Darkness deck, complete with every little bit of creature hate he could pack for me. Turn one got very habitual as he laid a Deadly Fighter Braid Claw, then quickly an Immortal Baron or Brawler Zyler. He’d swing in with everything really quickly. When I asked him to wait for any shield triggers before tapping anything, he got quite annoyed, especially when I did, and flipped a Natural Snare to send his threat to the Mana Zone. He was also real arrogant in his plays, shoving the corner of a Tornado Flame underneath a Deathblade of mine and flipping it into the air before declaring what he was doing.

I hope I painted a decent enough picture of this player for you, without getting into too much detail. Now, if this player were to play a deck, he should probably play Aggro, as he has little patience, wants to do things quickly and explosively, and is considered heavily with the game at hand. Obviously, not too concerned about the long term plan. That happened to be what he was playing, with minor control elements. He ended up making the Top 4, which means he probably made a good choice when choosing his deck type.

I saw someone playing a very cool deck, smiling and teasing whenever his cards complimented each other, or whenever he could do something cool. People like this, called “Johnnys” in magic terms, work well with innovative and new archetypes and combo decks well. People concerned with winning eventually, and getting a firm and comfortable grasp or lock on the game after it starts are probably better suited off towards control. They’ll take a decent amount of time with even fairly simple plays, just to make sure they’re not making a mistake.

Time and time again have I seen people misjudge themselves. When you’re making a deck or deciding on what to play for your next major tourney, don’t fool yourself. If you don’t have too much patience and just plain old don’t like games that go into overtime, build the best aggro deck you can. Don’t try and play control if you know you can’t. It does, in fact, take a lot out of a person to play a control deck for 6 rounds, especially when there’s the potential for a mirror match, where you could be easily outplayed anyways.

There’s nothing wrong with not being patient, or overly cautious, or planning carefully for some degenerate combo and winning with style. Just play a deck you’re comfortable with and a type you know you’ll do good with, and with practice, you can only do better with it. Hope this helps you with your deck building. Until next time…

-Hydromorph

Email: Kian1602@hotmail.com