So I've been trying to figure out for a while now what makes a player able to consistently top in YGO as there is no obvious indicator of having an edge over your opponent. If everyone is playing Spyrals and half of them are playing Spyrals designed to beat Spyrals. That means out of the half who have a noticeable advantage how do you decide who wins? One goal of this blog is to ferret out the reason someone like Billy Brake can win more than one YCS and one time two back-to-back. This post has less to do with that but still something to do with successful deck building and a possible balancing factor designed into the game.
On to the actual topic at hand, there are two kinds of decks you can play in YGO one has few if any searchers and the other has searchers that search for searchers. The current best decks are things such as Spyral and Trickstar which have the power to search for searchers via their Field Spell and Terraforming. The power in decks like that is in how small you can make the core of the deck without losing consistency. Trickstars have 9 Copies of Trickstar Candina which means you have 10-12 copies of every other Trickstar card in the deck.
Because of this you have over 80% chance of starting the duel with Trickstar Candina. In exchange if Candina is not allowed to search you may have to end your turn there making Droll and Lock Bird amazing against the deck compared to Ash Blossom which if they have two searchers (a 4th of their deck) then it is mostly useless. The most important thing about this Hyper Redundancy is that you can continue to add non-Trickstar cards to the deck and lose no consistency but any Draw power is effectively useless and every card you add past the engine hurts nothing.
Imagine your Trickstar Deck is literally 3 Candina, 3 Terraforming, 3 Light Stage, 3 Lycoris and 3 Reincarnation. Thats a 15 card deck, if you add 1 Lillybell you are at 16 cards with 24 free slots. But your deck contains 9 ways to get Candina, 12 Ways to get Lycoris, 9 Ways to get Reincarnation, 10 Lillybells. So now we can add inconsistent draws to the deck as filler (Legitimately they could be Ojama's and you wouldn't notice a difference in your play). The best filler in the game are Hand Traps meaning you would run as many as you possibly can, then you can run Pot of Desires which gets it's own paragraph.
So the Pot of Desires is an extremely powerful card that is at its most safe in a Redundant deck such as Trickstars where there aren't any real one-offs that matter. The fun part is the draw power is basically pointless when 16 cards in your deck are already in your hand by proxy, meaning the only cards worth drawing from it are Hand Traps which are due to how many you run also already in your hand. In this card Pot of Desires is just Pot of Greed without any power cards to draw. Hyper Variance decks absolutely love any draw power yet can't safely run Pot of Desires (Which is the point of the design).
Hyper Variance describes decks where the deck has a lot of small engines or single cards that fuel the decks plays. Often these decks are the most spam heavy such as DD Links or Plant Links even old Tengu Plant was one of them. In these decks every single searcher is amazing and any draw power can extend plays massively due to the sheer power of the cards. The hallmark of these decks generally is their routing such as Plant Synchro having a ton of 2-3 card combos that are extremely powerful making Pot of Avarice get banned due to the draw power and not the recycling.
When these decks are strong we end up running triple Upstart Goblin and Reckless Greeds to dig deeper. In our upcoming format these decks will be using Skulldeat as digging 4 cards down is good when there is minimum redundancy. These decks also are the most disrupted by Hand Traps, Ash Blossom beating their generally one search can end their turn with half a combo, Maxx C also ends the turn. Whereas the Redundant deck doesn't take too much pain from Hand Traps in exchange their combos are far less potent.
The issue here is Redundant decks are the best for large tournaments as you rarely can blame a loss on a bad hand and you don't auto-lose to well timed interaction. In exchange you really can't break a board as easily as the variant deck but thanks to Hand Traps your opponent won't get to make the board.
There of course is a scale for these two extremes where the more searching you add to a variance filled deck the more powerful it gets until it reaches redundancy. And the more external power cards added to a Hyper Redundant deck the further it goes towards variance where you can have better hands but also worse hands. (5 Hand Traps vs 5 Trickstar cards or searchers). I have a personal love for decks with high Variance where I can freestyle and learn new combos everyday but the learning curve can be steep.
Next Time I'll talk about Altergeists and what makes them amazing and also what makes them weak currently.
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