The Bad Card Theory of YUGIOH

Posted on Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Experience level: For beginners
Topic: Deck building
Written by: Jake (Bluemaster)

So, recently, I decided that the game of Yu-Gi-Oh contains no good cards. The flip side of this, of course, is that every card in the game is bad, although some are worse than others. Why, you ask? Well, for one thing, it opens the door for a variety of bad card humour ("Crush card? That thing's almost mediocre!" "Wow, I can almost see the mana cost on that one"). Jokes aside, thinking of every card in the game as bad makes good deck building easier.

Most players, when they begin the game, see all the cool cards in the game, and like them all so much. They cram them all into their decks, and when told that they should stick close to the 40 card minimum (IMO, there is no reason, ever, to exceed the 40 card minimum) they wonder why. After all, all the cards in their deck are so gooooood.

Wrong.

By thinking of cards as good, you can't see a reason to not play a lot. By thinking of cards as bad, you want to play as few as possible. This mode of thinking is supported by statistical argument, and thus makes sense in deck building.

If you're not a beginner, and you've read this far, you're probably thinking to yourself that this is just a very simple way of trying to trick newbies into playing 40 card decks as they should. It does function as this, but there's more to it. Even good players, heck, even the best, have trouble cutting some of the last few cards from their decks. This is because they focus too much on what good things the cards do for them.

Recently, a friend of mine, while debating Solemn Judgment in the Cat Synchro deck, said to me that he can't decide if it's good or not because sometimes it flat out wins games, and sometimes it flat out loses games. He was concentrating too much on the fact that it wins games, and wanted to play it, to win.

If you look at the bad side of a card, in this case, the fact that it was losing games, life becomes so much easier. Why in the world would you ever want to play a card that loses games? (Yes, there is, to some degree a risk v reward argument here, and no, I'm not saying Solemn is bad Cat Synchro. It's just an example.)

When you need to make those last few cuts from a deck, don't think about which one is best. Think about which one is the worst, and cut that. Think about how often a card is dead, how often it isn't dead but can't help in an efficient way. Think of every card in the game as bad, and you may find yourself winning more often with your new 'bad' deck than your old 'good' ones.

Until next time, may your cold waves always cost blue and two.