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The "Zone" system for deck construction by Sean

From: seanslcars@comcast.net
Date: Fri, 20 May 2005 23:42:29 +0000

Sean’s back with a new article for you all. Today I will look at the deck construction system I worked out for myself and share it with all of you. Hopefully this will help out a bit when you’re designing your decks. Don’t forget to check out www.seanzhomepage.freeservers.com for my personal site and if you want send in your decks to be fixed in my informal deck garage.
First the "zone key".
Green Zone: You’re safe. This is an area where you’re pretty much always OK. It’s the safe haven area for deck designing.
Yellow Zone: Here’s where originality starts becoming evident. If you’re set up in the yellow zone, you’re starting to think outside the box. But be careful you’re not thinking outside the box for a deck that belongs inside the box.
Orange Zone: You’re starting to get dangerous. This should be reserved only for specialty decks. Red Zone: Unless you’re trying something seriously original, you’re in trouble.
Deck Size: First off is deck size. We all know and love the 40 card deck rule of thumb. 40 cards is definitely the optimal deck size. However, I have seen 41 card decks used just as well, so for the Green Zone we’ll say 40-41 cards. Next up is the Yellow Zone. Anywhere from 42-45 cards would be a little walk on the wild side, getting a little daring. As for the Orange Zone, we’ll mark it as 46-49. You better have a good reason to be running this many cards. Finally, we’ll mark the Red Zone as 50 and up. That’s just suicidal.
Monster Cards: The yugioh instructional manual says that you should keep an even split of monster/spell and trap cards. It sounds nice and all, but in practice, it’s not really a good idea. Monsters hurt deck speed, and deck speed is one of those things we can ALL agree is vital. So we’ll mark the Green Zone as 18-20 cards. 18/22 is what I try to keep my deck ratio at. Moving on to the Yellow Zone we have the decks that step out a bit. Some decks, like Exodia, Stall, etc. may not have need of as many monsters as others. Others, like beatdown, rely on a strong monster presence, so we’ll put the Yellow Zone as 16,17, or 21 monsters. Moving along. The Orange Zone is where you will find most newbies who think that lots of monsters with a sprinkling of s/ts is the way to win. We’ll mark the Orange Zone as 14, 15, 22, and 23 monsters. Obviously the Red Zone is all others. It’s dangerous 2 be running extremely low or high numbers of monsters.
Spell/Trap Cards: Here we have the exact OPPOSITE of the monster card zone philosophy. Spell and Trap cards should be in the majority. They are much faster than monsters and generally more versatile. So the Zones here will simply be the inverse of monsters to keep everything in proportion. Green is 20-22, Yellow 19, 23, and 24, Orange, 17, 18, 25, and 26. Going outside those boundaries can backfire.
There’s my very basic system. Hope it helps anyone new to the game looking for deck design advice.
Comments? Questions? My email is seanslcars@comcast.net and my AIM screenname is NazGul0010. I’m not one of those people that says "No hatemail please". I love reading that stuff. Until next time-SetoKaibafan13