Deckbuilding and Technical Play

[IQuitDolphin]

I have been playing for some time, and even though I have gotten insanely better at building decks, and knowing how decks work, my technical play is stagnating.  Even though I have a great deal of knowledge in knowing what plays a deck can make and what cards are best for a certain build, I have NO knowledge of what to do under certain scenarios. Technical play may seem like little more than "no misplays", but it's an integral part of your winning strategy, and neglecting it is going to hurt your success.

 

For example, a strong turn 1 board consisting of Feral Imps, Pleiades, and Stardust Dragon is obviously a powerful board when facing most decks. But most people who don't know matchups will simply make that same board against Kozmo (in game 2), and will ultimately lose.

 

Deck building is an integral part of YGO, but technical play is the bread and butter. Even after building some relatively solid decks, I would enter a game only to not know what do in different gamestates, and I would make sub-optimal plays that eventually cost me the game. Player interaction is important in the game; even in PePe mirror matches I feel there is still some form of interaction as players try to break up soft lock boards. I really feel that more emphasis should be added on how to handle certain situations rather than merely discussing a card's merits, and I am working on trying to fix this issue of mine.

 

I would love to see what you people think about these two concepts. Fire away.

[Dova]

It doesn't matter how well you build a Deck if you do not know how to at least attempt to counter some situations. It doesn't matter how skilled you are if you are playing a terrible Deck.

 

I agree with you completely. It doesn't matter what a card CAN do, it matter what you do with it.

[Slinky]

This is why I prefer options. It means you can make a variety of plays at any given time to answer the current scenario.

[ihop]

Technical play doesn't seem like much more than "no misplays" because it really isn't most of the time. I think it was Hoban who said technical play is rarely about making amazing plays and more just about avoiding stupid ones.

 

Technical play's way more important than deckbuilding to a certain extent though. Obviously a crock of shite deck will not beat a top deck no matter how good the play is, but in a match between 2 of the same decks where the better player plays a less optimised version the better player will probably still have an advantage. The amount of people I've seen play excellently-built meta decks terribly and have very poor results due to that.