Making your deck more consistent
I’m sure you all have asked or been asked, “How can I make my deck better?” A popular response given usually goes by the lines of “It isn’t consistent”, “You need more consistency”. But how do you make your deck more consistent? That is my goal in this article. I will try to give you guidance and advice on just how to add consistency to your deck.
In this article I will be presenting to you 3 great ways to make your deck more consistent. Back in the older days of Yu-Gi-Oh, when the game was much slower than it is now, players had to rely wholly drawing cards via the Draw Phase to get the cards they needed to play out their combos. But over the years the game has sped up and now there is less need to rely on the Draw Phase. By adding one, two, or even all three of these engines to your deck: Deck Thinning/Searching, Draw Power, and Milling, you can add a great amount of consistency to your deck. The more of these engines you can incorporate into your deck, the better. Ever wonder why Chaos Dragon is such a powerful deck? Sure they have a ton of boss monsters, but the main reason they are so powerful is because they have access to all three of those aspects I spoke about above. They have massive deck thinning with Future Fusion, great draw power with Solar Recharge and Allure of Darkness, tons of milling from the Lightsworns, and searching from Eclipse Wyverns and Charge of the Light Brigade. Now, let's get on to the actual engines.
Draw Power
Draw Power allows you to get through your deck faster than you typically would. Adding a draw engine to your deck greatly increases its speed and increases its consistency because you can draw your key cards faster resulting in your big plays earlier in the duel and giving you early control of the duel. Destiny Draw, Solar Recharge, Reckless Greed, and Trade-In are great examples of cards that allow you to plow through your deck and get to your cards faster. The most important thing to keep in mind about Draw power is that it reloads your hand advantage. The experts will talk to you about advantage all the time and hand advantage is one of the most important aspects of advantage. Adding draw power to your deck allows you to go for big plays while keeping hand advantage so you have backup in case your opponent stops your initial play. Let's take a look at Dark World. Dark World has the best draw engine in the game right now and it’s a top tier deck mainly because of its massive draw power. Cards such as Gates of the Dark World, Broww Huntsman of the Dark World, Allure of Darkness, Upstart Goblin, and Reckless Greed give the deck loads of drawing power and they utilize this draw power to quickly gain advantage and overwhelm the opponent early.
Deck Milling
Over the past few years milling has become a very powerful and popular engine. Back in the older days of Yu-Gi-Oh, before pot of avarice existed, milling was looked at as a bad thing because you would be throwing away your cards with little to no ways of getting them back. But now we’ve gone through decks such as Plant Synchro, Lightsworn, and Zombies which all have major benefits from milling. Milling is basically the act of dumping cards from your deck into the Graveyard. If you’re new to the game this method may not make sense to you, but with all the cards we have now that have effects which include things such as special summoning from the Graveyard, milling is a very effective method when used in the right deck. Card Trooper, Ryko, Lightsworn Hunter, Charge of the Light Brigade, and Magical Merchant are examples of great milling cards which can be splashed into virtually any deck that benefits from milling. The obvious weakness of milling is that is that you never know what you may end up sending to the Graveyard. If you mill a spell or a trap, it is likely out for the entire duel and you’ll have no way of getting it back. But don’t let this deter you from using a mill engine. As long as your deck runs cards that thrive off of being milled such as Plaguespreader Zombie, Necro Gardna, and Spore, you will be fine with running a mill engine.
Deck Thinning/deck searching
I’m sure at some point in your dueling career you have ran a deck with 50+ cards, and had people tell you to trim it to 42 cards at the most. But what exactly is the need to trim it down? The reason is that with every extra card you put in, you’re making it statistically harder to get to the cards you need. New players often have the mindset of adding more powerful cards to their deck in order to give them more options. But the thing is, having more options means nothing if it is unlikely that you will draw into these options. Let's take a moment and look at some statistics – When you run a 40 card deck and open with 6 cards, all your later draws will have a 1/34 chance to be a card that you run 1 of. If you’re running a 50 card deck, all your later draws will have a 1/44 chance to be a card that you run 1 of. With a 40 card deck you’ll have a 28% chance of opening with at least 1 card you run 2 copies of. And a 39% chance of opening with at least 1 card you run 3 copies of. In a deck running 45 cards, these chances fall to 13%, 25%, and 35.6%. In a deck running 60 cards, these chances fall to 10%, 19%, and 27.5%. * Credit goes to pojo for those stats *
The main purpose of deck thinning is to increase your chance of drawing into a certain card/s. Let’s say you’re running a Malefic deck that runs 2 Necro valley and 3 Geartowns. They both serve the purpose of allowing you to summon a Malefic monster so it is as if though you are running 5 of the same card In a 40 card deck. Out of your first 8 draws, you’ll a 43.7% chance of drawing at least one of them. Now here is where deck thinning comes in. Let’s say you add 3 Terraformings to your deck. It searches for the field spell cards so you can basically count it as one of the spell cards and now you have 8 of the same card in a 40 card deck. Out of yourfirst 8 draws, your chances of drawing atleast one of them has shot up to 60%. Another way to look at deck thinning is that it basically lowers your deck count and increases your chances of drawing into a card/s you need. Lets say you add 3 Upstart Goblins and 3 Thunder Dragons to your deck. This pretty much lowers your deck count to 34 and now the chances of drawing into the card/s you need are higher.
Now on to Deck searching. I could have put deck searching as a whole other category but the thing is, when you search a card from your deck you are actually thinning the deck. So deck searching falls under the category of deck thinning. Deck Searching is the method of searching through your deck and adding the card you need directly to your hand. Hero decks have the best searching in the game and its no surprise why they are so consistent. The most popular searchers and best searchers are cards likeSangan, all he has to do is go to the grave and you search. Gold Sarcophagus, at the cost of waiting two turns you can search for ANY card in your deck. Terraforming, great for any deck running field spells, it can search any and all fields. Pot of Duality, this card adds draw power, deck searching, and deck thinning all into one. Duality is arguably the best consistency increasing card that can be splashed into many decks. Searching allows you to keep minor advantage in hand and on the field. However, searching is usually a 1-for-1 so you’re not actually gaining advantage like you would with draw power, you are just maintaining the former advantage you had.
In conclusion of this article I just want to remind you that most, if not all top tier decks are able to utilize 1 or even all of these consistency engines into their build. Dark World has massive draw power. HERO decks have a great amount of searching. And Chaos Dragons have a great deal of milling. However, not every deck can use a Lightsworn milling engine or a HERO searching engine. It is crucial that you only add an engine to your deck that has synergy with the deck. So when you have a deck that needs more consistency, try testing each of the engines one by one in your deck and stick with whichever one works the best for you and has the most synergy with the deck.
I’m sure you all have asked or been asked, “How can I make my deck better?” A popular response given usually goes by the lines of “It isn’t consistent”, “You need more consistency”. But how do you make your deck more consistent? That is my goal in this article. I will try to give you guidance and advice on just how to add consistency to your deck.
In this article I will be presenting to you 3 great ways to make your deck more consistent. Back in the older days of Yu-Gi-Oh, when the game was much slower than it is now, players had to rely wholly drawing cards via the Draw Phase to get the cards they needed to play out their combos. But over the years the game has sped up and now there is less need to rely on the Draw Phase. By adding one, two, or even all three of these engines to your deck: Deck Thinning/Searching, Draw Power, and Milling, you can add a great amount of consistency to your deck. The more of these engines you can incorporate into your deck, the better. Ever wonder why Chaos Dragon is such a powerful deck? Sure they have a ton of boss monsters, but the main reason they are so powerful is because they have access to all three of those aspects I spoke about above. They have massive deck thinning with Future Fusion, great draw power with Solar Recharge and Allure of Darkness, tons of milling from the Lightsworns, and searching from Eclipse Wyverns and Charge of the Light Brigade. Now, let's get on to the actual engines.
Draw Power
Draw Power allows you to get through your deck faster than you typically would. Adding a draw engine to your deck greatly increases its speed and increases its consistency because you can draw your key cards faster resulting in your big plays earlier in the duel and giving you early control of the duel. Destiny Draw, Solar Recharge, Reckless Greed, and Trade-In are great examples of cards that allow you to plow through your deck and get to your cards faster. The most important thing to keep in mind about Draw power is that it reloads your hand advantage. The experts will talk to you about advantage all the time and hand advantage is one of the most important aspects of advantage. Adding draw power to your deck allows you to go for big plays while keeping hand advantage so you have backup in case your opponent stops your initial play. Let's take a look at Dark World. Dark World has the best draw engine in the game right now and it’s a top tier deck mainly because of its massive draw power. Cards such as Gates of the Dark World, Broww Huntsman of the Dark World, Allure of Darkness, Upstart Goblin, and Reckless Greed give the deck loads of drawing power and they utilize this draw power to quickly gain advantage and overwhelm the opponent early.
Deck Milling
Over the past few years milling has become a very powerful and popular engine. Back in the older days of Yu-Gi-Oh, before pot of avarice existed, milling was looked at as a bad thing because you would be throwing away your cards with little to no ways of getting them back. But now we’ve gone through decks such as Plant Synchro, Lightsworn, and Zombies which all have major benefits from milling. Milling is basically the act of dumping cards from your deck into the Graveyard. If you’re new to the game this method may not make sense to you, but with all the cards we have now that have effects which include things such as special summoning from the Graveyard, milling is a very effective method when used in the right deck. Card Trooper, Ryko, Lightsworn Hunter, Charge of the Light Brigade, and Magical Merchant are examples of great milling cards which can be splashed into virtually any deck that benefits from milling. The obvious weakness of milling is that is that you never know what you may end up sending to the Graveyard. If you mill a spell or a trap, it is likely out for the entire duel and you’ll have no way of getting it back. But don’t let this deter you from using a mill engine. As long as your deck runs cards that thrive off of being milled such as Plaguespreader Zombie, Necro Gardna, and Spore, you will be fine with running a mill engine.
Deck Thinning/deck searching
I’m sure at some point in your dueling career you have ran a deck with 50+ cards, and had people tell you to trim it to 42 cards at the most. But what exactly is the need to trim it down? The reason is that with every extra card you put in, you’re making it statistically harder to get to the cards you need. New players often have the mindset of adding more powerful cards to their deck in order to give them more options. But the thing is, having more options means nothing if it is unlikely that you will draw into these options. Let's take a moment and look at some statistics – When you run a 40 card deck and open with 6 cards, all your later draws will have a 1/34 chance to be a card that you run 1 of. If you’re running a 50 card deck, all your later draws will have a 1/44 chance to be a card that you run 1 of. With a 40 card deck you’ll have a 28% chance of opening with at least 1 card you run 2 copies of. And a 39% chance of opening with at least 1 card you run 3 copies of. In a deck running 45 cards, these chances fall to 13%, 25%, and 35.6%. In a deck running 60 cards, these chances fall to 10%, 19%, and 27.5%. * Credit goes to pojo for those stats *
The main purpose of deck thinning is to increase your chance of drawing into a certain card/s. Let’s say you’re running a Malefic deck that runs 2 Necro valley and 3 Geartowns. They both serve the purpose of allowing you to summon a Malefic monster so it is as if though you are running 5 of the same card In a 40 card deck. Out of your first 8 draws, you’ll a 43.7% chance of drawing at least one of them. Now here is where deck thinning comes in. Let’s say you add 3 Terraformings to your deck. It searches for the field spell cards so you can basically count it as one of the spell cards and now you have 8 of the same card in a 40 card deck. Out of yourfirst 8 draws, your chances of drawing atleast one of them has shot up to 60%. Another way to look at deck thinning is that it basically lowers your deck count and increases your chances of drawing into a card/s you need. Lets say you add 3 Upstart Goblins and 3 Thunder Dragons to your deck. This pretty much lowers your deck count to 34 and now the chances of drawing into the card/s you need are higher.
Now on to Deck searching. I could have put deck searching as a whole other category but the thing is, when you search a card from your deck you are actually thinning the deck. So deck searching falls under the category of deck thinning. Deck Searching is the method of searching through your deck and adding the card you need directly to your hand. Hero decks have the best searching in the game and its no surprise why they are so consistent. The most popular searchers and best searchers are cards likeSangan, all he has to do is go to the grave and you search. Gold Sarcophagus, at the cost of waiting two turns you can search for ANY card in your deck. Terraforming, great for any deck running field spells, it can search any and all fields. Pot of Duality, this card adds draw power, deck searching, and deck thinning all into one. Duality is arguably the best consistency increasing card that can be splashed into many decks. Searching allows you to keep minor advantage in hand and on the field. However, searching is usually a 1-for-1 so you’re not actually gaining advantage like you would with draw power, you are just maintaining the former advantage you had.
In conclusion of this article I just want to remind you that most, if not all top tier decks are able to utilize 1 or even all of these consistency engines into their build. Dark World has massive draw power. HERO decks have a great amount of searching. And Chaos Dragons have a great deal of milling. However, not every deck can use a Lightsworn milling engine or a HERO searching engine. It is crucial that you only add an engine to your deck that has synergy with the deck. So when you have a deck that needs more consistency, try testing each of the engines one by one in your deck and stick with whichever one works the best for you and has the most synergy with the deck.