Deck Analysis 6.
Looking at Deck Construction in general.

By ~ShineSoldier~

Goodday, everyone.
My sixth article in this serie already, and I decided to do something special this time.
Today, I’m going to explain to you all how I create all my decks in these articles.
It’s not my style to just grab some cards, check which ones are cool, put them together, add some staples and create the deck.
No, not at all.
When constructing a deck in my articles, I’m using a specific system. That’s how you could call it. Actually, it’s just a way of constructing a deck, and everyone has its own way that suits him best.

Part 1 – Choosing your theme
When constructing a deck, the first thing that you’ll have to do is choosing a theme.
A theme is what makes a deck playable.
Without a theme, the cards in your deck don’t work well together, so that you will have a hard time winning when playing a duel.
Some examples of deckthemes that are seen quite oftenly nowadays are:

1. Aggro
2. Warrior (-Toolbox)
3. Control
4. Zombie

Some other themes are:

1. Mill
2. Gravekeepers
3. Chaos
4. Burn
5. Lockdown
6. Hand Destruction

When you’re choosing a theme, choose one that you like, one that makes you feel comfortable. It must fit your own personal playstyle, cause if it doesn’t, you won’t have fun during your duels.
So, the theme forms the heart of your deck. All other cards that you will add, have to fit the theme, so basically, the theme IS the deck.
I think you will understand the importancy of the theme now.

Part 2 – Discover the powers of your decktheme
When you have decided which theme to run, part 2 begins.
This part is also very important for the deck.
It’s the part in which you are going to think about your chosen theme and try to discover what it’s good at. For example, Water Decks like Bouncing and Beatdown, while Chaos Decks are good at removal, speed and swarm.
Why is this part important?
It’s important, because you must utilize the strong points of your deck to the max, so that you can get the full potential out of your deck. Adding a Ceasefire in a Chaos deck is one of the smartest things to do. Why? It supports its destruction capability by flipping your opponent’s monster face-up, so that you can remove them easily.

Part 3 – Adding the basic support
In this part, you’ll add some basic cards that fit into your theme. Like for Gravekeeper’s, this is the part where you begin to add cards that are in every single Gravekeeper deck, like Necrovalley and Rite of Spirit. When using Burn, the standard Stall Cards will be added in this part.
The cards that you’ll add in this step will be very important to your deck. They are used to form the basic support for your decktheme, so pick them carefully.
A good way to form this basic support, is to look through your entire collection of cards and put ALL your cards that support the theme you chose in any way apart. After that, look at your pile of support cards and get rid of the support cards that you don’t want to include in your deck. Keep doing this until you think you’ve got a nice basic form of support. Themes that focus on a specific monster (or monsters) should add those monsters in this part to. That means that Chaos Decks need to add their Chaos Sorcerers in this step, for example.

Part 4 – Discover the weaknesses of your decktheme
In this part, you will look at your decktheme once again. But instead of dicovering its strenghts, you’ll try to figure out its weaknesses. Again, this is a really important step. ‘Knowing your weakness will lead to your victory’. That’s something that was said usually.
Yu-Gi-Oh is no difference. When you know what your decktheme isn’t very good at, you can try to add cards to lighten these weaknesses. For example: Chaos hates it when their cards are removed from play by your opponent. To prevent this, you can add multiple Kycoo the Ghost Destroyers. They protect your Graveyard AND they’re Dark! Gravekeepers rely heavily on Necrovalley. Their main weakness would be Necrovalley’s destruction, since Gravekeepers would be regular 1500-attack monsters at max then. For this, you’ll need to add multiple Magic Drains or Solemn Judgments.
Think about it: When taking away your weakness, what could possibly destroy you?

Well, there is one crappy thing that can ruin you totally, or help you out great.
It’s something that we don’t control, nor can we predict it.
It’s Luck!
When your opponent gets lucky, all your protection will be useless, since their ‘luck’ will get them the exact right cards at the exact right time.
However, this is a little bit off-subject, so let’s get back to the article.

Part 5 – Protecting your cards
This part looks a bit like Part 4. In this part, you’ll be adding some protection, depending on your decktheme. Gravekeeper decks can skip this part, since they’ll add a lot of protection in Part 4. In Burn decks, you will probably add some Magic Reflectors or Magic Drains, and no Solemn Judgments, because you will need to keep your Life Points high. Chaos Decks can use Solemn Judgment without really have to worry, since they’ll have their Chaos Sorcerers to protect them. Chaos Decks are an example of a decktype that will run less cards to protect their S/T defense and more Monster Protection than Burn Decks, since they focus on monsters, more than on Spells and Traps.
The bottomline: Try to discover what your deck relies on and when you found that out, add the appropriate protection.

Part 6 – Originality
This may sound a little bit weird, but when you’ve added all the necessary protection and the cards that form your theme and you have worked out your weaknesses, it’s time to add some originality to your deck. This might be the hardest step of all, since you will need to think hard about what kind of support you could give your deck besides the support you’ve already given to it. Add cards that are not made specifically for your decktheme, like using Rush Recklessly in the Zombie deck from one of my previous article for example. Light of Intervention in a Chaos deck would be really surprising too. Another original something is for example the Dark World Deck with Magical Merchant as one of its main cards to abuse ‘The Forces of Darkness’. Find out a new combination yourself, or use a strategy in which your cards work perfectly together. Try adding cards that nobody would expect. That kind of things will make you a good Yu-Gi-Oh Duelist. The ability to think widely and come up with new and powerful combinations is a gift and if you’ve got it, don’t hesitate to use it.

Part 7 – Staples
This is the part in which you will add your final cards. All the space that’s left will be filled with so called staples. Here’s a list of the cards that are considered to have to be in every deck:

1. Breaker the Magical Warrior
2. Snatch Steal
3. Premature Burial
4. Scapegoat
5. Dark Hole
6. Heavy Storm
7. Mystical Space Typhoon
8. Torrential Tribute
9. Call of the Haunted

As you can see, there are nine cards that are considered staples. That means almost ¼ of your deck is auto-in. And that’s exactly why I hate staples. When ¼ of your deck has been thought up before you even begin with the Deck Building, you will have less space for your own interesting combinations and such. Therefore, some of them should just be banned. Why not ban Dark Hole, Heavy Storm, Snatch Steal and Torrential Tribute for 6 months? We could at least try and see how it goes then...
Anyway, let’s get back to the subject.
You could always leave out some of these cards, like Scapegoat or Premature Burial. At least it adds some originality.

So, when you follow these steps exactly, you will get a deck that fits perfectly into your chosen theme, has enough defense to protect your cards, can play with less weaknesses than normally and a deck that doesn’t lack originality.

There are two final steps in this procedure.

Part 8 – Look at your deck as a whole deck
The title of this part may be a little bit vague, so I’ll explain it to you. What I mean with this is that you need to construct your deck and take a look at the amount of monsters, spells and traps to see if they are a little bit normal. So don’t make a deck with 2 monsters, 1 spell and 37 traps. It just doesn’t work.

Part 9 – Play duels to test your deck
And the final part already of deck construction already. After you’ve constructed your entire deck, you should duel against many different duelists so that you can discover some things that you might want to change later. If you missed anything, this is the perfect way to notice those things. When you thought you had a good defense, but in a duel it seems that your defense just sucks (I had this problem with the Zombie Deck I constructed), you can add some more defense cards so that your deck will perform better.

Part 10 – Have fun with your deck
This isn’t really a part of the deckbuilding, but the ’10-step deckbuilding plan’ sounds better than the ‘9-step deckbuilding plan’. Of course, this IS important. I’ve said it earlier in this article, but I guess this deserves to be repeated. When playtesting your deck or competing at tourneys, make sure you have FUN! This is the most important thing in all Yu-Gi-Oh and if you don’t have it, then you’re no real duelist. You have to make a deck you love. You must enjoy playing with your deck, not just smacking cards on the field and expect them to win a duel. Your cards need to have a meaning to you. They’re not just puppets, they’re your partners in a duel and they are going to play all duels together with you.

One final note: Remember that EVERY CARD counts in your deck. When you’ve gone through all the Parts of this deckbuilding plan and you’ve got space left for some more cards, do NOT pick some random cards from your collection and add them to your deck. Go through all the Parts once again and check if you haven’t missed any cards. Think even harder than you did the first time to discover even more tactics and strategies that make your deck original.

That’s all for this article.
I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful.
If you want to report anything, feel free to mail me at slam25@hetnet.nl

Deck ideas are still welcome too, so if you’ve got any, please mail them to me too. I might use your idea for one of my future articles.

‘Til next time.
~ShineSoldier~