In Part B I looked at the 14 cards that were in both the 2003 and 2004 World Championship winner’s decks that primarily are used to weaken your opponent.  The analysis was done by placing the cards on a Star Circle to indicate where the impact of the card was targeted, meaning just exactly where was the pain applied.  In Part C I want to look at the remaining 13 cards and similarly analyze them on the Star Circle to see where they benefit you and what the benefits are.

I’ve gotten a few e-mails about this series of articles, thank you.  First, Mystical Space Typhoon does not negate normal magic cards so the effect of the normal magic card still goes through.  Negate and destroy are independent and different things.  This means that if your opponent plays Heavy Storm and you reply with MST, you do destroy the Heavy Storm, but not until after its effect is activated.  This means that MST is best used against continuous M/T cards and cards your opponent has just set and cannot activate yet.  Second, I want to clarify that the Star Circle is a map of sorts and is flexible in its use.  The original Star Circle article was about mapping out the effects of cards and how cards moved around from your deck to the removed from play pile.  In this series of articles I’m using the Star Circle differently.  I’m plotting the locations where the benefit or damage happens.  My thinking is that by drawing two Star Circles and analyzing the distribution of benefits and weaknesses we might be able to see some “Bigger Picture” things that we had not really thought about before.  This entire exercise is intended to provoke thought not anxiety.

Here’s the list of the 13 cards and I’ve separated them between banned or unbanned cards:

Mystic Tomato
Airknight Parshath
Magician of Faith
Sangan
Sinister Serpent
Scapegoat
Pot of Greed
Graceful Charity
Premature Burial
Call of the Haunted
Witch of the Black Forest (currently banned)
Monster Reborn (currently banned)
Mirage of Nightmare (currently banned)

You might not agree with how I associate the cards to points and some cards might belong on more than one point, but for this analysis I’m trying to focus on the main benefit of the card and put my attention there.  The cool thing about drawing a Star Circle is that you can draw your own and make your own observations.

On the Star Circle point for my hand I’ve noted that 8 cards have impact here.  They are, Airknight Parshath, Witch of the Black Forest, Sangan, Magician of Faith, Sinister Serpent, Pot of Greed, Graceful Charity and Mirage of Nightmare.  In today’s analysis the idea is to think about the benefit the card provides since these cards all benefit your hand in some way.  The first observation I have is that clearly it’s important to have a selection of cards in your hand to give you options.  The basic rules only give you one card per draw phase, yet you can play multiple spell and trap cards per turn.  The math suggests that if you could only get one new card per turn you would run out of cards pretty quick if you’re going to use spells and traps.  So finding ways to get more cards out of your deck and into your hand must matter a lot.  Of the 8 cards, 6 of them are dedicated to this purpose.  Two the six were so good that they got banned, Witch of the Black Forest and Mirage of Nightmare.  Witch made it easier to get a big monster, usually Jinzo in your hand and ready for pounding your opponent.  Nightmare made it easy to get a fist full of cards, and when used in combination with Mystical Space Typhoon, you got the keep all of them.  But do not frown, that leaves 4 cards you can play.  Airknight lets you draw a card every time it does damage.  This wouldn’t be so exciting except for the fact that Airknight has a trample effect (the ability to inflict damage when attacking a defense position monster) and a 1900 ATK.  Airknight is also the only other tribute monster in the list of 27 besides Jinzo.  A well protected Airknight can ensure you have more choices when you start your turn.  Sangan is similar to Witch but not quite as good.  The great thing about Sangan is that you get to rummage through your deck and pick the monster you’re going to get, this is nice but it only works once unlike Airknight.  Pot of Greed and Graceful Charity are cards most everyone knows and loves - free cards!  The point is that it’s obvious that with this many cards dedicated to getting more cards in your hand, it’s an important thing to be doing and we’ve got 4 really good cards that can help you do that.  In my opinion, Magician of Faith is one of the most under-rated cards in the list that folks don’t play often enough.  Picking a spell card out of your graveyard and reusing it is priceless.  Most folks play about 15 spell cards so you know you’re going to have a reason to need Magician of Faith’s effect.  In an environment where more and more spell cards are on the limited list, Magician of Faith gives you a great way to recycle them for reuse.  Sinister Serpent rounds out the list and I first want to say that Sinister Serpent is not a card you want to play on the field.  I’ve seen folks do this thinking that there’s something wonderful about replaying Sinister Serpent to the field over and over again.  Don’t do this.  The entire point of Sinister Serpent is to have a card in your hand that allows you to discard a card (usually as an activation cost) that comes back to your hand so you can discard it again.  This prevents you from having to discard something you want to keep in your hand, think about Graceful Charity as an example.

On the top point of the Star Circle that represents my field I’ve noted that 5 of the cards have benefits here.  They are Scapegoat, Mystic Tomato, Monster Reborn, Call of the Haunted and Premature Burial.  Scapegoat is a very cool card that is a great to activate as a reply after your opponent clears the field with Torrential Tribute.  You just need to be careful because if your opponent has an Airknight, you’re going to get hurt real bad.  This is one of the purely defensive cards that made the list mainly because it often buys you some time when things aren’t going so well.  It’s also a quickplay so you can set it and flip it during your opponent’s turn.  Mystic Tomato is similar to Sangan in that you get to pick a monster out of your deck.  The key differences are that it has to be a dark attribute and it gets summoned to the field.  This is good if you need field presence, this is good if you need to get dark monsters in your graveyard so you can summon a chaos monster, and this is good if you have Don Zaloog in your deck.  The very nice thing is that you get a monster moved directly from your deck to your field and you get to choose it.  The other 3 cards also get a monster moved onto your field.  They are, Monster Reborn, Call of the Haunted and Premature Burial.  Monster Reborn is banned for a good reason.  It doesn’t cost anything to use and you can get a monster from your opponent’s graveyard.  Premature Burial has an 800 life point cost and Call of the Haunted can only get cards from your graveyard and not your opponent’s.  Call of the Haunted is also a trap so it’s slower than Monster Reborn (meaning you have to set it and wait until your turn is over before you can use it).  These cards get monsters moved out of your graveyard and onto the field.  Similar to Magician of Faith, these cards give you two ways to recycle cards, especially limited cards like Jinzo.  You should exploit this whenever possible.

Some general observations about these 13 cards is that its about half the list and that says to me that a solid deck ought to have some balance between cards that work on improving your position and cards that work on weakening your opponent’s position.  It’s also clear to me getting more cards in your hand is just as important as getting more monsters on the field.  I noticed that there was definitely a lack of combos.  There’s only one 2 card combo in the entire list and Mirage of Nightmare is now banned.  I think this suggests that if you want to win tournaments you need to try to build decks that have a lot of cards that work independently.  I need to be clear about this; I don’t mean that you should not be thinking about synergy, like having lights and darks so you can do a chaos summon.  Clearly you need to have cards that generally work together.  But I do mean that putting a specific card that will only work with another specific card in hopes of getting both in your hand at the same time so you can whack your opponent ….. well that doesn’t seem to be what tournament winners do.  I agree that there are a ton of great two card combos, but they don’t seem to show up in the final tiers at big tournaments.  Perhaps this is why fusions and rituals are not played very often.

Please feel free to e-mail me thoughts about these cards or the other cards that I’ve not discussed from Part A.  Maybe I’ll include your thoughts in the next article.

notasperfectasyou

It’s easy to find me on the message board, e-mail is ok, but I like open discussion better.

napay’s prior articles and why you’d want to read them:

“Thoughts and Observations about Winning Decks – Part B” presents a second installment of analysis for the purpose of seeing what can be learned from comparing two proven decks focusing on cards that weaken your opponent.

“Thoughts and Observations about Winning Decks – Part A” presents a first installment of deck analysis for the purpose of seeing what can be learned from comparing two proven decks.

“Mom and Dad Won’t Let Me Buy Cards On EBAY” presents some thoughts on the good and the bad of buying cards on EBAY and how you might work EBAY for a better experience.

“The Exodia FTK” presents an example of applying calculated mathematical probabilities to Yu-Gi-Oh in demonstration of why a deck 40 cards is a good idea.

“Fake/counterfeit Yu-Gi-Oh cards” presents a summarized version of my own experience buying fake cards and what I learned from it.

“The Star Circle” presents a very visual way to think about the components of your deck and how to think about card flow as a way to improving your deck.

“How Big is your Monster” is about why you need to stop thinking about how to get big ATK monsters in your deck and why you do need to think about how cards work synergistically

 

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