Feature: Proper Side Decking

Hey guys! This is an article I've been promising and hyping up for quite a while, I've just never had the motivation or the clarity to actually sit down and write it! I know this is something a lot of you have been looking forward to reading, so I wanted to make sure I did the best job I possibly could, because side decking is easily the most important part of competitive Yu-Gi-Oh play.

Side decking really boils down to a a series of choices and meta-calls. In order to make an effective side deck, and then also use it in the most efficient manner possible, a player has to be absolutely familiar with his own deck and with the decks he or she expects to come up against in a tournament setting. Obviously, this is easier said than done, and it can be a huge learning experience for a new player.

So, let's start with the basics. As a player you are given fifteen slots to use for a side deck. The most common tactic is to side deck cards that will help you in your most disadvantageous matches, and while that is generally a good idea and rule of thumb, it's not always what a player should follow when choosing what cards to put in their side deck.

A more effective way of siding is to look at your own deck and to address its own strengths and weaknesses. For instance, as a Blackwing player, a majority of my side decked cards are concerned with either A.) Monster removal or B.) Increasing my offense. Blackwings have a lot of trouble with monsters with high attack, and being as they run so few monsters to begin with, protecting them from the opponent's creature effects is vital. So, in my case, cards like Nobleman of Crossout, Chain Disappearance, Cyber Dragon and, of course, Thunder King Rai-Oh, are very helpful in most of the matches I'm likely to come across.

Being able to identify your own deck's weaknesses is a very valuable skill. Looking objectively at a deck that you've likely spent a lot of time and money on perfecting is difficult to do, but it will ultimately make your side deck choices easier and more effective.

The choices one makes for the fifteen cards they side deck is vitally important to their success as a player in the tournament scene. Side decking is somewhat of an art, and it takes practice. Obviously, with only fifteen cards to work with, we can't possibly hope to cover every deck we may come up against, but we should still be working to make our side decks as versatile as possible.

This brings us back to a principle of core theory in competitive Yu-Gi-Oh play, known as "utility". Utility is a term that refers to the level of usage a single card may have. Put simply, it's a measure of how useful a card is going to be in any given situation and, using this concept we can then determine how many copies of said card we should play or side deck.

Take, for instance, a card like Book of Moon. Book of Moon has an outrageous level of utility, because it is useful in a whole slew of different situations. You can use it to block a direct attack, to turn a monster face-down to prevent a Synchro summon, it can be used to recycle a monster's flip effect (Ryko, Morphing Jar), etc. When you draw a Book of Moon, it is almost never a "dead" card -- that is, it always has some use and benefits the player. It has, as we say, a very high utility.

On the other hand, we have cards such as Gorz, the Emmisary of Darkness. Gorz is a great card, and can definitely turn games in your favor when used at the right moment but, due to its summoning requirements, it tends to have a very low utility in the early game, with its usefulness increasing as the game goes on. A limited usefulness gives cards a low utility, and its generally cards like these that we want to avoid when side decking, though there are certainly exceptions.

So, having said all of that, let's get down to business with a sample side deck!

1x Vanity's Fiend

1x Treeborn Frog
1x Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer
1x Blackwing - Elphin the Raven
1x Giant Trunade
1x Swords of Revealing Light
1x GB Hunter
1x Book of Moon
1x Magic Cylinder
1x Blackwing - Breeze the Zephyr
1x Starlight Road
1x Metal Reflect Slime
2x Blackwing Bombardment

As you can see, this side deck is what we would call a pretty bad one -- but why?

There are a lot of cards at one, which as we all know, is terrible for consistency and most of the cards have a very low utility, which means that they likely won't be very useful in any match up and more often than not likely won't ever ended up being sided in in game two and, if it comes to that, game three; not to mention none of them help to further a Blackwing deck's main strategy.

So how do we fix this? Well, a side deck is very dependent on the player's main deck because, as I said earlier, the whole point of a side deck is to address the main deck's weaknesses in match ups against other meta decks. Let's start by identifying some of the Blackwing deck's major weaknesses and unfavorable match ups.

Weaknesses:

- Monster Removal

- Opposing monsters with high attack and/or defense

Bad Match Ups:

- Gravekeepers

- Frog Monarchs

It's immediately evident why Blackwings have trouble with both of these decks. Gravekeepers are essentially a glorified beatdown deck, and the 500 point attack boost that Necrovalley provides all of their creatures, combined with the monster removal of Gravekeeper's Descendant poses a huge threat to Blackwings.

Frog Monarchs are also a bad match because they play so few cards to the field at once, making Icarus Attack, the deck's biggest threat, essentially worthless. When used in tandem with the removal power of Caius and Raiza, this match has the potential to get very ugly for Blackwings as well.

So, having identified our weaknesses, let's look at some cards that could help us address them. When side decking, we shouldn't be concerned with siding cards that "shut the opponent down", or, more simply, cards that only take care of one card in one deck. As I mentioned previously, we want our side cards to be as versatile as possible, so we'll almost always been in search of those "one size fits all" cards to include in our side decks.

Obviously high attack and defense is a big problem for Blackwings, so Cyber Dragon is a great answer to these sorts of things, not to mention a lot of other current meta decks also have trouble with high attack, so Cyber Dragon will fare very well in almost any player's side deck. It's also great in the Machina/Gadget match, due to the introduction of Chimeratech Fortress Dragon.

Thunder King Rai-Oh has been a staple side deck card for a very long time now, and while its overall usefulness has gone down somewhat this format, it's still a great card worth side decking. Being able to negate a synchro summon as well as stop the opponent from adding cards from their deck to their hand outside of drawing is a great thing. It also prevents Pot of Duality from being activated, and the 1900 attack is just icing on the cake.

Nobleman of Crossout will help us take care of annoyances such as Ryko and Snowman Eater, both of which are seeing pretty heavy play in today's meta. It also has the potential to remove from play a recruiter monster such as XX-Saber Darksoul, Gravekeeper's Recruiter or Sangan. A very versatile card.

As you can see, we're siding cards to address our biggest concerns, which cover a pretty large variety of matches. This is the key to effective side decking. Without utility and versatility, your side deck more or less amounts to a worthless stack of fifteen cards.

But, almost more importantly than the cards you side is the number of a card you decide to play. It's a basic principle of logic and probability that the more copies of any one card you play, the more likely you are to see said card in a duel. Applying this principle isn't as simple as it sounds on paper. There are obviously some cards that are going to be more important to a player, and it's those cards that we should be playing multiple copies of because we not only want to have a higher chance of seeing them and thus using them in a duel, but we also will have a higher probability of seeing the card much sooner in a duel.

As anyone who is familiar with Yu-Gi-Oh will know, most often it matters most who gets which cards first. So, when deciding which cards you're going to side deck, think long and hard about the usefulness of that card, how much and how soon you want to see it and then decide on the number of the card that is appropriate to place in your side deck.

Often it will be the case that you'll wish to side more copies of a given card and simply do not have the room. This is all part of the art of siding -- prioritizing certain cards and weaknesses over others and then making decisions from that information. As I've said, it takes practice and a lot of play testing to really find a side deck that not only works for your deck, but for you as a player as well.

Finally, wrapping things up, let's look at another, much better side deck!

2 x Cyber Dragon

2 x Thunder King Rai-Oh

2 x D.D. Crow

2 x Nobleman of Crossout

2 x Trap Hole

2 x Chain Disappearance

2 x Dust Tornado

1 x Mind Crush

For those of you keeping record, this is actually my current side deck for my Blackwings! Rather than explain everything, however, I think it might better benefit you all to analyze the side deck yourselves and try to see my reasoning for the cards and how many uses they may have in different match ups.

I hope you all enjoyed this article and get some use out of it. I plan on writing more technical pieces like this in the future, so, as always, don't be afraid to give me some feedback on what you liked and didn't like about the article -- that's the only way for me and my blog to grow!