A Guide to Deck Building
Step 1: Identify your deck's strategy and real strengths
We should start deck building by identifying what parts of of a deck or architype actually work. This can be done by either looking at other peoples experience with the deck, testing our in progress deck, or just eyeballing effects. Look for effects the generate easy value, easy disruptions, searchers, and removal. Look to cut bricky or inconsistent cards, unneeded effects, or inefficient effects
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This guide will be using a Nekroz Deck as an Example. We begin by identifying Nekroz as a control utility deck thanks to cards like Nekroz Kalidscope as our main value option and Nekroz of Unicore as out main disruption. We keep Nekroz of Brionac and Nekroz of Clausolas as our main searches. Hearld of the Arc Light is easy value. Elder Entiry N'tss and Nekroz of Trishula are our removal.
Step 2: Add in techs and engines
Our next step is identifying and adding in Potential tech or engines that could boost the decks goals. This could mean single cards like extra-foolish burial for decks with spell graveyard effects or it can mean whole engines like adding in Spellbook Magician of Prophecy and Spellbook of Knowledge. Look for engines with similar goals, types, or attributes. Don't be affraid to add in meta engines like adventure, invoked, or DPE.
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If you're having consistency issues with your deck. Don't be afraid to check the consistency of your main strategy. Running your odds of drawing a starter and at least one extender through a hypergeometric calculator can be very helpful.
Here's a link to one I like to use: https://aetherhub.com/Apps/HyperGeometric
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In our Nekroz example we’re going to be adding in a Dogmatkia engine to synergize with Nekroz of Kalediscope’s goal to send cards from the extra deck to the graveyard. since Nekroz are water ritual monsters who don’t use a normal summon, we can also run barrier statue of the torrent. Lastly, I’ve added a generic extra deck package to buff up the deck’s options
Step 3: Cut unnecessary cards
This is one of the hardest but most important steps in building a deck. That is to further cut unnecessary cards. we have the core of the strategy figured out but not every card is going to be needed or is going to be needed at 3 copies. Modern Yugioh is very fast and explosive so needing duplicates for longer games isn’t necessary in most decks. Other cards might just be too situational or too hard to set up consistently to work.
If you're struggling to cut cards you can use the dead hand method. When playing games take note of what cards in hand either don’t come into play or come into play less during a game. Look for cards that are less effecient or look for duplicates that come up. Those cards should be considered for cutting.
In our Nekroz example most of our cards are searchable so we can cut them down to 1. Only our key searchers and win cons are reaming at three. Luckily this is a very easy process in Nekroz so we don’t have to worry to much but if it’s a bit harder to decide what can we do?
Step 4: Add in outs and removal
Now that we have a deck and a strategy, we need to prep the deck to handle the variety of wacky and problematic situations modern Yugioh can put you in. Make sure the deck has cards to handle the following situations.
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A problematic spell/trap flood
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A problematic monster floodgate
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An Untargetable card
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A towers monsters
Decks are fine having most of these options in the side deck. but filling in extra deck slots with removal options it’s the best way to go about this.
For our Nekroz deck I’ve added a side deck with dark ruler for the big monster board. For spell and trap removal I’ve added cosmic cyclone and Lighting storm. For towers monster out plan is to beat over them with Accescode Talker. For non-targeting removal we have trisula.
Step 5: Add in hand traps or blow outs
This is modern Yugioh and if we want to be able to go second we need to make sure our opponent can’t go first. Having extra negates in hand is always broken. The optimal number of handtraps is around 6-15 but 9 is really where I’d place most decks.
For our Nekroz deck that’s very easy. We’ll round out the deck with 3 Ash Blossom, 3 Infinite Impermanence, and 3 Effect Veiler. But do note this should change depending on the meta or to BM people at your locals.
A secondary option instead of hand traps is blowout cards. Cards such as Dark Ruler No More, Super Polymerization, or Forbidden Droplet. These cards let us circumvent our opponent's end boards by negating or removing cards while preventing the opponent from responding. Typically these are favored in faster Metas where one or two hand traps do very little to stop a deck's combo
