Deck building
How to build a deck? There are no simple ways to describe it, but here are few tips that you should consider while making a new deck.
1) First of all you need to decide what kind of a deck do you want.
There are 4 main types of decks:
Rush – Simplest form of deck yet also very effective.
It consists only cards for 1, 2 or 3 mana and is made to let you spam them during first few turns so that you can break your opponents shields as quickly as possible.
Aggro – Deck with an idea very similar to the Rush –
attack whenever you can to constantly put pressure on your opponent.
The difference between Rush and Aggro is the type of cards they are using.
Aggro can have cards with mana cost up to even 8, while rush wants to finish before his opponent gains that much mana.
Control – Different kind of a deck, Control doesn’t want to destroy your shields right away. With control decks you try to control your opponent by discarding his hand, destroying his monsters and then when your opponent dont have anything that could let him win you break shields. Very often control deck will finish game with breaking all of the shields at a single turn and ending game instantly.
Midrange – 4th type of deck which is something between Aggro and Control as it have both of these features – creatures that can put pressure on the opponent + controlling abilities. Midrange can sometimes start attacking soon and sometimes it can play like control and wait until the very end.
So at the very begging you should decide which type of deck you want to build. What will be the main idea. Finish the opponent very soon? Try do deff and finish him at the end with some nice combo? Think about it and go to the next part:
2) Civilisations
Mono civilisation decks (the ones where you use only single civilisation) are quite bad in general with mono water being strongest from them. If you dont want to build a weak mono civilisation deck then you should consider combining some civs. to make your deck stronger. Take a look how many civilisations you should have in deck type:
Rush – 2 Civilisations
Aggro – 3 Civilisations
Control – 4 Civilisations
Of course how many of them you pick is up to you, but remember – to make your deck playable you need consistency, so for example rushing in early game while you have 4 different civilisations in there wont work as you will have problems with mana.
Also a control deck with just 2 civilisations will probably have too less options to control his opponent and win regularly.
Have you picked civilisations that you want to include in there? Good, next step is:
3) Defense against Rush (if you are building Rush you can skip this part)
It’s great feeling to control your opponent, but if you dont have enough deff then before you can do something you will get eaten by Rush.
To prevent it you will need 2 things: Low mana cost cards (2+3) and shield triggers.
Best shield triggers to choose from are mostly:
Holy Awe, Aqua Surfer, Terror Pit, Burst Shot, Soulswap, but there are much more cool cards that help you, just use “shield trigger” tag and find them in the shop.
About low mana cards it depends on the civilisation that you have picked and your preferred playstyle to tell what will be good. If you are building Aggro deck and you play cards like Gonta, Quixotick or some other strong monster then you should be fine. Just keep in mind these Rush decks are very effective and if you dont think about defending against them then you will lose each time you face them.
4) Draw + Defense against Discard
Once again – Rush dont care about these silly things since the only thing he wants to do is – you wont guess it – rush your opponent. In every other deck you will need some form of draw, as playing from your top deck limits you very much. Also you need to worry about how many cards does your opponent have in his hand. Even with more monsters and shields on the battlezone, if you have 0 cards while your opponent have 7 then you will most likely lose as with good deck he will have many good cards that will turn your advantage upside down. To prevent that you may use discard, or you may use cards than counter discard abilities like:
Delacerna, Sanfist or Rain of arrow
So first of all think about how you will be drawing cards from your deck (both simple drawing like Energy Stream or Mist Rias and Deck Search like Logic Cube or Dimension Gate will work) try them out and see which ones work best in your deck.
And then think about discarding cards in your opponent hand if you decided to go for a Darkness or pick some cards that will help you against discards like the ones we have listed above.
5) Total number of cards in the deck + number of pieces of each card
In TCG the minimum number of cards in a deck is 40, but unlike in OCG you may use more of them. When is that a good idea? If you are playing cards like Mist Rias, Skysword and other cards that will quickly deplete your deck (if you draw last card of your deck you lose instantly) then it’s good idea to add few more card and make your total 45 or 50. Some control decks (especially the ones with Mana Bonanza) use even 60 cards, but you have to remember – more cards in your deck = less consistency, although me personally I hate losing by decking out so I prefer to add more cards and avoid decking out in general. Keep in mind that if the game is taking very long time and your opponent is close to decking out you may “help” him with that by swaping some of his creatures for cards like bronze-arm tribe or skysword that will take additional cards from his deck, or like transmogrify which may do same thing.
About number of pieces of each card – max is 4 pieces of same cards, and if some card is essential in your deck then you should use all 4 of them, while only additional cards you may keep as singles. Just remember – the more single cards that you have the weaker your consistency is and the weaker your deck is as its becoming more random.
6) Tempo and how cards work with each other
Tempo mean how does your cards for each mana: 2/3/4/5 work with each other, for example if you want to play Techno Totem at turn 4, which helps with destroying your opponent monsters with his tap ability, then you dont want to play spells only at turns 2 and 3 as you wont have anything to attack with after techno totem uses his ability.
So basically look at your lower mana cost cards and think about how they work with each other – for example, after playing Bronze-arm tribe at turn 3, at turn 4 you may play Mist Rias or Petrova, as you have gained additional mana with it’s ability. So now at turn 4 you have a monster for 5 mana, so it may cause your opponent to fall behind. Tempo is especially important with aggro decks as you need constant pressure with stronger and stronger monsters each turn, so look at cards in your deck and think how does they work with each other.
7) Answer to most common decks
Last part is looking at the decks you will face most of the times and figuring out how you may beat them. If your opponent plays Warlord Alizionius and there is not a single way you can destroy or stop it, then you will have a hard time against it. If your opponent spams the battle zone with low mana cost creatures with 1000 or 2000 power, it will be hard to destroy each one with cards like terror pit which cost 6 mana, so some mass removal like searing wave may be needed. Look at deck tier list and while playing with people pay attention to what they use and what kind of decks/cards you have most problems against and try to figure out how to prevent that. Sometimes single card in your deck like photocide or bazagazeal dragon may change things around for you.
These are all of the tips that may help you build your deck, but remember to try new things and think unconventionally as well. Some people say 1000 cards in Duel Masters TCG limits the game, that may be true, but I’m certain that some of them still hide a lot of potential and maybe you will be the one to discover that potential.