High Tech- A Guide to Teching

Tech cards are a crucial part of making any deck. A tech is a card that is put in a deck, often to see how well it does against current metagame, but also to create new possible combos that people haven’t yet seen. Generally, these cards must fit in well with the deck they are being put into.

One famous example of a tech card is "Safe Zone". It was used in an Inzektor deck, and went surprisingly well alongside them. The main reason for this comes down to some very basic game theory. To get a good match up, you need the right cards at the right time. This is why experienced players use cards that can be used in many different situations that are likely to happen; safe zone is one of these cards. If it is the target of a card like Mystical Space Typhoon, then you can chain it and target one of your opponent's monsters. This means that when it is destroyed by the effect, you destroy that monster for a net  1 CA. The other way it is useful is to protect your monsters. Chain disappearance is a very common anti meta card. Let's say you have a face down Safe Zone on the field and a Rescue Rabbit in your hand. If, upon the normal summon of rescue rabbit, your opponent activates Chain Disappearance, Safe Zone can stop it from crippling your deck, also leaving you with a Rescue Rabbit still on the Field which you can use.

A potentially infinite number of tech cards exist. It has become a general term for a card that is not usually put inside a deck of the type you are using, but it can also refer to an anti-meta card. Many techs can go into Lightsworns. As an example, there is Fiend Comedian. This card's effect is:
"Toss a coin and call it. If you call it right, all of your opponent's cards in the Graveyard are removed from play immediately. If you call it wrong, send a number of cards equal to the number of cards in your opponent's Graveyard from your Deck to your Graveyard."
This card is not used very often; few people even know what it does. But it can work miracles for a Lightsworn deck. Given, you must flip a coin to determine which of the 2 effects it uses, but there are many occasions in which it does not matter which result comes up. Quite simply, it doesn’t matter whether you mill many cards from the top of your deck or banish your opponent’s whole Graveyard. They’re both game-changing effects in their own right, and it can even be chained to cards such as Monster Reborn or Rekindling if you are feeling lucky.

Generally speaking, adding in the right tech cards is crucial to any deck builder. You can’t simply hope that a standard deck with no differences to what a person may expect would be able to play around what your opponent can do, as they know what kind of combos you will try to pull the second you reveal your archetype. The best tech cards tend to cripple your opponent’s strategy, add completely new combinations to the deck, or protect the main strategy from your opponent’s counters. Therefore, you can group tech cards into three different groups; offensive techs, strategic techs, and defensive techs.




Offensive Techs

Offensive techs are used to stop whatever your opponent might try to do. It is very difficult to try and expect in advance what your opponent will do in terms of before you actually play against them, as you do not know what their strategy is, so offensive techs generally rely on side-decking. However, certain cards can be put in the Main Deck to try and deal with your opponent. An example of this would be Royal Decree, as a few people opt to main this card in decks which do not rely on Trap cards because many other decks use traps and Royal Decree would stop that part of their strategy. You could also class Dimensional Prison and Compulsory Evacuation Device as commonly used tech cards, as they are used to stop your opponent’s monsters that come from the extra deck, or others that have built-in protection against being destroyed.

As stated above, offensive techs also reside mainly in the Side Deck. While it would be crazy to have cards that go against specific decks in your Main Deck, it is always a good idea to include cards that counter the current meta. The best Side Deck cards can be used against multiple different meta decks and also many less popular decks, as you then have more response to shut down your opponent’s strategy with. An example of a card like this is Chain Disappearance, which stops crucial monsters with less than 1000 attack from seeing any more play in a match, unless your opponent has something to special summon a banished monster with.




Strategic Techs

Inventing new combos with cards that people don’t think of is crucial to creating strategic techs. This can actually be done simply by looking through lots of random cards and thinking about what kind of deck they might go into. Sometimes you could even make a whole original deck from that kind of thought process, as a combination of cards might go extremely well together. An example of a strategic tech would be Genex Undine in Mermails, as it heavily supports the main strategy by allowing you to send a WATER monster from your deck to your graveyard as a cost, and it creates a new combination that can be used.

You could also class certain Side Deck cards as strategic techs, with a process known as “offensive Side Decking”. This is where you change the strategy of your deck using the Side Deck, either partially or fully, and it often involves either swapping out or swapping in cards that are easy to side against. This is because people may wish to counter the strategy you used in the first game by siding, so you have the option to either side out the cards they are trying to counter, making the cards they have sided in unusable, or you could not use the easily-countered cards in the first game and swap them in on the second. Both techniques are good to confuse your opponent as to what your strategy is, and both can be used at the same time; you could swap one archetype for another similar archetype, either of which would be easily countered by certain cards, but not the same ones. You could also include cards that are not necessarily good against all decks, and so are not worth being put in the Main Deck, but could cripple most cards. An example of this would be King Tiger Wanghu, which would stop many decks which rely on cards with 1400 or less attack, but would not work in the Main Deck as it would be unable to deal with certain decks effectively, such as Elemental Dragons.




Defensive Techs

A defensive tech, as mentioned before, protects your main strategy. Many of these are considered staples, and cards like Forbidden Lance and even certain Extra Deck cards like Wind-Up Zenmaines have been used to protect both Life Points and crucial monster cards. This kind of defense is vital if you want to pull of your main strategy, as most opponent’s will run basic monster removal cards such Dark Hole and Bottomless Trap Hole that could stop you from pulling off a combo. It would also be necessary to run cards that could stop your monsters being destroyed in battle, and that is where cards like Forbidden Lance have a double use. Because it stops a monster from being affected by Spell and Trap cards, you can protect a monster you have just summoned from being destroyed. This can catch your opponent off guard, as they are more likely to play aggressively if they have some back-row cards to defend themselves with; if someone has a Mirror Force or a similar card set, they are generally more willing to Summon their valuable monsters that may need a turn or so to set up. If you can stop their face-down card from working as they have intended, then their monster becomes very vulnerable and you can hinder their strategy by playing a stronger mixture of attack and defense than they did.

In terms of siding in defensive techs, it is much more difficult. You could side in cards to stop their more offensive sides, such as Royal Decrees if you were using a LIGHT based deck as the obvious Side Deck card that they might use is Light-Imprisoning Mirror. You could also potentially side in more Spell/Trap removal to prevent their defensive cards, which works in a manner stated by a common phrase: “Prevention is better than cure.” If you can stop your opponent’s aggressive plays before they work on your strategy, it puts you in a position to play how you wish. It is always a much safer field when your opponent has no Spell/Trap cards, and it is a big gameplay element to make the field as safe as possible for whatever strategy you want to bring in.




In conclusion, knowing what cards to tech is a crucial deck-building skill and is vital to all gameplay elements. Even cards that everyone considers staples that should be used in most decks are technically a form of tech (get it?), so it is nearly impossible to make a deck which does not include them. Because you can use different techs to do different things, it is a good idea to think about what kind of cards your deck needs. If your deck is likely to need a lot of protection but no reinforcement in either base strategy or in stopping your opponent, then it would be a good idea to tech in some cards to support this. It is an ideal yet impossible situation to have a deck that is perfect in attack, defense and strategy, but it is a goal that you should have while building a deck to reach a much of a balance as physically possible, and get as close as you feel you can to that perfection. It’s often a good idea to try out new cards, possibly singularly, in your Main Deck, and see how well they fit in. If the card does particularly well, or you use it a lot in the Extra Deck, then it is worth keeping. If, however, you never get a good chance to use it, or it just gathers dust in your Extra Deck, then the response is rather obvious: take it out. As it is only one card or so at a time, it can’t do any real harm, and you can slowly manage and improve your deck by using this strategy. Overall, that is probably one of the best ways to find techs, as you can quite quickly generate combinations in match situations that you may not have seen otherwise.