What Does Deck-Building Mean? Improving Deck-Building - Yugioh Theory Discussion

What does deck-building mean? How can we build better decks? Thoughts and discussions on what we can do to improve our decks. As a competitive Yu-Gi-Oh! player, deck-building is your most important way to impact the game, and so how you think about building your decks has a huge influence on how well you can play the game. I know a lot of people, myself included, don't always think about deckbuilding; we just do it. However, by thinking about your deckbuilding and the process, you can improve it and your results. Deckbuilding: the process in which you approximate the results of an infinite set of matches and use them to improve the results in another infinite set of matches or a subset of them. Variance: The difference between the results from a theoretical set of matches and an actual set of matches. The goal with deckbuilding is to eliminate variance, so that your actual results become what you would expect them to be. Ideally this means that you would win every single game, and although impossible, it's valuable to attempt to achieve it. Sources of Variance: 1. Deckbuilding Variance - What You Draw We cannot control what we draw, and even though statistics can help us predict them, it's largely out of our control. This is like when you draw triple desires and then desires into another desires. Statistically, it shouldn't happen, but sometimes it does, and unfortunately it happens a lot more than we'd like. 2. Matchup Variance We cannot control our matchups. There can be 399 Pendulum Magician decks in the room and 1 Anti-Meta Stun deck with 3 Anti-Spell, 3 Barrier, etc all in the main deck. If you're the unlucky person who plays this guy round 1 or something, too bad, nothing you can do. This happens often when attempting to metagame. You attempt to improve one matchup and then don't even play it. Matchup variance. 3. Your Opponent's Deckbuilding Variance This can be a positive or negative. Sometimes your opponent just opens incredibly well, and sometimes they open unplayable. 4. The Die Roll Depending on the metagame, you can account for this to an extent, but if you cannot, this can be a huge source of variance. You can account for this by building your deck to go first or second during formats where you can assume most players want to go first or second. Like you could build to go first during go-2nd spyral format, and now you can build go 2nd since magicians and most other decks want to go 1st right now. 5. Technical/Mental Play We cannot control what our opponents do. Perfect example of this happened last weekend actually. My friend was playing True Draco against Pendulums. Standard pendulum ending board is Zefra Metaltron + OE-Vortex Dragon + Norito, and my friends deck is AMAZING when it comes to breaking that board. But the Magician player ended his turn with a Dweller instead. This is game 1 mind you, so he should not have know my friend was playing True Dracos. There was no way for my friend to account for that, and it cost him the game. Sometimes players doing unorthodox things affects your results. The mental game is the only way to have any influence on the opponent's technical play. If you can mind game your opponent to play into your outs, then you can remove this kind of variance and move closer to victory. Anyways, if you watched the whole video or read this far, comment #deckdoctor :) Thanks guys, hopefully you can take something away from this and start considering these things when deckbuilding. Contacts and Social Media Links: Facebook: facebook.com/toptieryugioh Twitter: twitter.com/toptieryugioh Tumblr:   / toptieryugioh   Email: [email protected] Thanks for watching/reading, TopTierYugioh Music Information: Music by LakeyInspired   / lakeyinspired   Song - Days Like These