Skills And Techniques Thursday

By Seamus Allen

Skills and techniques part 2

Yep I’m back again. Take a look at part one to quickly refresh your memory or if you haven’t seen it yet do so now preferably in the forum at the article section as it is edited.

So basically reads are a way of figuring out your opponents cards that you don’t know using the cards you do they have or had in the case of destroying there cards. Last time we had figured out we were against a macro cosmos deck and were trying to figure out there set spell or trap.

We knew it wasn’t dimensional prison, macro cosmos, trap dust shoot and we also knew they didn’t have a dimensional fissure in there hand as these cards would have been activated already. What about mirror force? Shouldn’t they have activated it if it was mirror force when we
attacked with our monster?

Perhaps not. Expert players always try to use cards like mirror force, heavy storm and lightening vortex to destroy 2 or more cards for the one card they lose. Most of you probably know about advantage: Its basically how many cards you have in your hand and field and generally the more advantage you have the more commanding of a position you are in. Moves will almost always result in a change of advantage.

Advantage is measured relative to the amount of cards your opponent loses for the amount of cards you lose to do per a certain move. Say you use smashing ground to destroy your opponent’s monster. You lose a card but so does your opponent which balances out. But say you use lightening vortex to destroy one monster on your opponent’s field. For vortex you have to discard to activate it so you lose 2 cards vortex its self and the card you discard where’s your opponent only loses one card to your 2 resulting in a minus 1 advantage for you as you lost one extra card.

WARNING: using vortex on one monster is not to be tried at home unless in the gravest emergency… Where’s if you use vortex to destroy 5 monsters you lose 2 cards where’s your opponent losses 5. That’s a minus 3 advantage off your opponent. That definitely puts you in the lead. So it could be a mirror force. We will now abandon our imaginary duel to start going into other techniques.


WARNING: This article is only for cork players.After all this is the Cork site. Any other county players stop reading this stop now. Especially if your from Dublin because of the Ireland-Dublin tournement. Now back to subject: Say in a duel you were about to either swarm the field or set lots of spells and traps(it doesn’t matter which) so basically your doing a risky move if your opponent plays lightening vortex or heavy storm your in trouble.

If there’s a certain card in your opponents deck you really don’t want them to draw there’s a certain way of checking the amount of chance of them drawing it. First check their graveyard to make sure they haven’t used it yet, or in the case of there being 2 or more of those cards usable in a deck check how many copies they haven’t used. Then count the cards in there graveyard, field, Removed zone and hand and then subtract from 40(most decks used by good player have close to 40 cards if not 40 and those who don’t normally never draw good cards).

Say the total count of cards in field,hand,grave and removed zone (I will call this the u count) is 17 cards you subtract from 40 to get 23 the number of cards in your opponents deck. Now in the case of heavy storm which you can only use one per deck that is a 1 in 23 chance of your opponent drawing it assuming its not already in there hand. If you want to check the chance of heavy storm being in there hand add the number of cards in there hand with the number of cards remaining in there deck and then divide that number by the amount of cards in there hand.

You can round the number if you need too. What about cards like lightening vortex which are unlimited? Some people although there are very few don’t use vortex at all! Mostly though people play one or two vortexes. In the last article I said to always stock pile info on your opponent from earlier duels in the match. If this is game 3 and you know your opponent plays 2 copies of vortex you do the same as above and if you were in the exact same situation that’s a 2 in 23 chance of drawing the lightening vortex.

AGGRO BLUFFING
In yugioh bluffing is done all the time. My special form of bluffing which I call agro bluffing is when you need to bluff and your opponent has lots monsters if you have a monster in your hand that can destroy some of the weaker monsters on your opponents field, summon it and attack one of the weaker monsters saying” well I might as well get some damage in while I’m at it” and then set a card to your spell and trap card zone. Try to emphasise the fact that you are setting a card to your back row. I’ve done this a couple of times before and its worked every time

OVER EXTENDING
Don’t over extend For example don’t play too many monsters in the one turn. A torrential or vortex could lose you the game. What I really should be saying is don’t over extend too quickly . If you play a monster every turn your fine as you always draw to replace the card you got rid of from your hand.

If any thing happens to your field as long as you have a big hand you can repair. Of course if you have a huge hand over extending isn’t too bad as long as your hand can repair the damage if something goes wrong. The same applies to spell and traps. You don’t want your opponent to heavy storm the field.

RESPONDING TO READS
If you control a large swarm and your afraid of attacking into mirror force tap one or 2 of the monsters with higher DEF to defence position. If your afraid of torrential and you control a large swarm why don’t you just set a monster if you realy need to as it could be destroyed too and attack? Especially if your opponent doesn’t have much cards and your in a winning position. What about morphing jar? Well if your opponent is out of most of there cards where’s you’ve lots you obviously don’t want to attack it if theres a chance of you drawing something to destroy it. If you need to attack it set all your spells and traps but don’t set 5 so you can activate spells next turn. But how do you read a morphing jar or torrential tribute?

Well for morphing jar if your opponent draws and sets loads of spells and traps you can guess it’s a morphing jar. With torrential if you recently attacked a sangan or they used reinforcements of the army or any thing else that searches a monster(always remember the cards you know your opponent has in there hand)and you know they have a monster in there hand or even suspect it and yet they set a spell or trap and end with out playing a monster that could be a torrential tribute.

I’m doing these articles just before the nats a great time to become better. That’s it for this week next week we will be looking at deck building and the top decks of the format. Thanks for reading and if you have any comments, questions, disagreements or agreements feel free to share them and I hope you all learned something.. See you next time

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Skills And Techniques Part 2