Aiming for the Stars

In the beginning of the game, the one an only thing that mattered was the attack point of the monsters. High points were pretty much everything back then. After that, monster effects mattered most. Low attack points could mean nothing if they had a huge effect. Then, what became most important was the creature itself: if one of them was a Tuner, it could mean a very powerful monster summoned from the Extra Deck.

Today, the main concern of almost every deck are the monster's levels. Equal levels and easy ways to bring them to the field means easier XYZ summons. Some decks focus in a certain range of level and try to gather monsters in that range. But it doesn't mean all the effort has to come from one single part of the game. Let's review a card that was mentioned before:

Hope for the Best

There are always those situations where you can't control the situation. Since most decks acts differently, the answer works the same way: Chaos Dragons summons more and more monsters on the field and the deck don't relies on luck. Inzketors and Wind-Ups need, some part of their strategy on the field working as a start, but still got some sort of speed themselves.

But what about decks that just explodes in their first hand and them only waits for the top deck help them? Luck doesn't work for everybody. So what these decks do is just try to control the field with what they got and hope for the next card be good.

There are ways to increase your chances, just as this one:

Being a better player

Again, I'm taking a break of talking about cards. This time we're going to talk about a thing far more decisive than cards in the game: the player.

In a way, in a duel between 2 decks of equal potential, if a player does every move exactly as it supposed to be,no misplays and no bad choices and he/she still loses, there's only luck to blame. If there is at least one misplay, the player has the total right to blame himself/herself (although he/she shouldn't take it too seriously, it's a game, after all). If both players do misplays, the overcome of the duel is just chaotic, so it would be best if in these games there was a judge or a spectator with enough knowledge to point out the misplays.

But, in a tournament, no matter what level it is, there are some other conceptions that makes the game different than casual one. We can see this while playing some decks:

Coring with Koa'ki Meiru

They say that many archetypes Konami has released weren't truly made to be good ones. The truth is, they're right. Unless your favorite archetype is being used by a main or at least recurrent character at the current Yu-Gi-Oh! Anime, new cards probably won't be created. It's even worse if you're a fan of something from Hidden Arsenal or Duel Terminal, but, at least, you know how to not expect anything new. Konami might surprise you with new cards from a forgotten archetype, but sometimes it takes half a decade to do it.

That means we don't see many representatives of every archetype nowadays. After a banlist, no Ice Barriers at all (Trishula). After the XYZs becoming the Extra Deck dominating card, we're start to missing the Ally of Justice (Catastor). Sometimes, no scraps as well (Dragon). I know, the game changes, and we're supposed to adapt ourselves, but exactly how we haven't see anyone in the TCG using any of the cards of the only archetype that actually was built to be an anti-meta?

After a long introduction, let's check our first Koa'ki Meiru card, Doom:

A lower level of chaos

Hey guys! Nice to see you again.


See, we're almost always talking about how awful the metagame is just because you have to play pretty much everything that beats that kind of deck and/or play some other meta, otherwise you won't win. Almost always they abuse of some chaos strategy by exploiting advantage of some LIGHT and DARK monsters from the graveyard and keep a high field control by destroying or negating your cards. But there was a kind of deck that have won some tournaments at Japan and can make use of the Chaos strategy, as well as some unusual, like Exodia and Final Countdown. Sadly, this kind of deck ended mysteriously, just like it has started.

We're talking about the Mystic Piper deck:

The Seal has been broken

Today, I'm not going to do the regular thing and talk about some cards to defeat Meta, but rather talk about what Konami announced recently: A special card that is going to be released in the Legendary Collection 3: Yugi's World: The Seal of Orichalcos.

Counting with your cards

Most players who try to play meta decks without any knowledge of how those works usually have some problems, mostly because of the card's rulings. However, most players that keep doing that or when some try for their first time building a different deck of their own, they often don't know a simple basis of what makes a deck resilient is not which card you put, but how the card works in the deck.

We will start looking at a, somewhat, forgotten card:

Countering the odds

It's always time to change to newer things. Except this time we're going to take a better look to the old cards.

Not a long time ago, effect monsters showed their importance in the strategy of the decks, being in a larger number than Spells and Trap cards combined in decks like Junk-Doppel and Agents. Today it's the other way around: in every meta deck we're starting to have fewer monsters, with Trap Cards being sometimes the dominating kind. It seems that having more monsters to ensure the strategy have become less important than disrupt your opponent's strategy.

At an different time, Spell Cards (maybe in the time when they were called Magic Cards) could change the entire duel, even if a few were played. Back then, not every card would have a free cost in order to be played, but even if they had, it was worthy in those days. Nowadays, things are sightly different. Spells with free cost are pretty much the only option, as every card in your deck counts and you can't afford risking your strategy just to disrupt your opponent's.

So, even if the times have changed, it doesn't means that these cards have lost their meaning: