General Lesson 2

Day 1: Hello again! This week will be about building a main deck. I know I have been talking to a few of you about talking about siding, but I felt the main deck should be covered before the side.

Standards - Most decks have the same standards and have reasons for it.

Deck Size: Nearly every single deck seen in regionals and nationals will have 40 cards in them. This is the lowest possible. People do not go over this because with less cards means more chance of drawing the cards you want. This can help take out all the weaker end cards.

Balance: This is NOT true for every deck, but most decks have about 20 monsters, and 20 spells and traps. Depending on the deck there should be slight variation sometimes. Chaos Dragons for example do not want spells and traps in the grave. They want light and dark monsters, so most of their deck will be light and dark monsters. My chaos dragon deck has 32 monsters, and it works very well.

Main Card: Most decks will either search, or use synchro/xyz in order to get to one or two main monster cards get them out. This is not true for some decks, such as a beatdown of sorts, but most decks will have a synchro monster or xyz monster because they tend to be easier to summon than monsters in the deck. It doesn't always have to be a card that beats the opponent. It can be simply a card that slows down the opponent or eliminates many cards they have on the field or in their hand.

Extra Deck: This used to be not as common to have a full extra (in the old days fusion) decks due to a lack of variety there is now. Today we can use tuner monsters to synchro summon and just have any monsters the same level and overlay them for an xyz monster. There are tons of xyz monsters that any deck with two or more of the same level monsters can have a wide variety of monsters. Xyz monsters are currently the easiest to fill up the extra deck on. It does not lower consistency. There is no reason to try to get it filled with a strong variety of cards possible to summon.

Archype: Monsters of the same archtype generally work well with eachother. Some decks dont really have an archtype, but most do.

Day 2: When making a deck what should be decided first is what type of deck. Will it be based off of an idea, archtype, taking advantage of a card(s) and its abilities? Usually choosing an archtype is the easiest route to go when making a deck, as most of the cards already work specifically with eachother.

When making a deck what should be done first is putting in view of which cards an how many you are thinking of. Do not worry about deck size at this moment, just put together the deck. When making the deck try to keep a good balance of staples that will work well with your deck.

Many decks use staples. Staples are decks that work in many decks instead of just one or two. Monster Reborn, Dark Hole, Heavy Storm, Mystical Space Typhoon and Book of Moon are some of the most common spell card staples. Many trap cards, such as solemn warning/judgment, compulsory activation devise, bottomless trap hole, and fiendish chains also are common staples. Some staples will only work for decks with certain types, attributes, or archtypes. It is often important to search specifically for cards that affect them. On duelingnetwork you can search in the description for a common type or attribute of your monsters. Searching up multiple deck lists and looking at specific cards (but not net decking)  and considering how they would work is another way. This can be time consuming, but it does pay off.

Now the deck should be as thinned as possible. This includes removing as many cards as possible that have little use in the deck or brought down to lower than maximum amount for whatever reasons. Upstart Goblin is a great card to fill in 1-3 slots usually if it is possible to bring the deck down to 37-39 cards. It thins the deck out. If it is too difficult to bring it down at this time, then play some singles. Test out the main deck after adding in the extra deck.

The Extra deck as described yesterday can be very diverse nowadays. Tuners that work well with a common type, monster level, or attribute is often good to add in a deck if it can bring a synchro monster with just the one card from the hand. If tuners are not a good option, then xyz monsters are often times a great one.  The goa lis to us a wide variety to help in many situations with each rank. The same ones are generally used for each rank due to how good they are,

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