Notes From Master Duel: Thinking Probabilistically
I’m back from my vacation in Duel Links! I ended up playing Master Duel a lot instead, so I wanted to write down some loose thoughts about the game.
Thinking Probabilistically - I tend to think about things probabilistically in Master Duel. Rather than focus on W/L, I look at "what was the chance of me winning that?". Sometimes there are games where you just cannot lose, because you drew a hand of [non-overlapping starters] [1]; other times you just are on the back hand from the start, drawing a double copy of a once-per-turn card. Being able to figure out the games you are supposed to win and see the games you cannot win makes tilt happen less.
Probability in Deckbuilding - Probability plays an oversized role in deckbuilding. All decks want to execute their game plan. All decks want to gain maximal advantage. The optimal route to executing a game plan is to make full use of all five cards in the opening hand. How many copies are card is in a deck is influenced by how much it starts the game's engine versus the chance of drawing doubles (bricking).
Once-Per-Turn (OPT)- Sometimes this does not apply, because there are not-once-per-turn clauses, but modern YGO in general revolves around the once per turn clause. The most broken cards are those that can get around this clause. (See Mirrorjade and Branded in Red interaction). The more non-overlapping OPT effects a deck can fit in to execute their gameplan, the stronger and more consistent it is.
A really big example is in modern Branded, which has evolved from a simple [[Branded Fusion]] deck with a single point of fusion to one where there are multiple points in [[Blazing Cartesia, The Virtuous]] or using [[Fusion Deployment]] to get Albaz out instead. To complement that, the Bystial loops is also used to send [[Branded Retribution]] to get any branded spell, usually [[Branded in White]] or [[Branded in Red]], two more fusion points. To me Branded plays much more like a Cyberse deck in that there is no fixed Ashable point to stop fusions. You would have to stop them completely through D-Barrier.
Where Is Cyberse? - You would think that Cyberse decks would a thing, since it wasn't even too long ago Accesscode was still being complained about, and [[Mathmech Circular]] . A great problem with Cyberse is that outside of Circular, Accesscode, it has no "power cards". You can foil an Accesscode with Bystials appearing outta nowhere these days, and since it doesn't have protection the turn over, the Cyberse player is a sitting duck. Plus, the new Master Duel time limits force you to be really proficient at your deck, otherwise you will easily time out doing long loopy combos. In short, the payoff is not worth the effort. See: Purrely.
Meta-Warping Purrely - Purrely is a truly meta-warping archetype. It also defines modern Yu-Gi-Oh in the "don't let your opponent play" sense. Purrely's gameplan is to make [[Purrely Noire]], which is an unaffected monster with a non-once-per-turn (!!!) bounce, so long as you have more than 5 materials on the thing. (easy)
Once it hits the board, the number of counters drop drastically to zero for most normal decks, since you cannot set up a board with Noire returning your cards, and since it is not affected, you don't have to think about anything except for gaining advantage and going for game.
Right now it has shades of old [[Runick]], where it had all its in-archetype cards were avaliable without limit, so you could fit your entire deck full of Purrely spells to maximize your chances of getting a 7-5 material Noire. You don't care about interaction from your opponent, just getting out the Noire is enough, afterwards you REALLY don't care about what your opponent does.
The only consistent way to out an unaffected monster is a kaiju, and since they are not searchable (mostly, probabilistically, the Purrely player will get to Noire far more often than a X player gets to their own gameplan, PLUS the need to search/get kaijus. Some interesting tech has been to use [[Witch of the Black Forest]] or use [[Destiny HERO - Plasma]] to out Purrely, but both have major problems and represent a brick when drawn.
Either you run kaijus, Niburu, reaper, and HOPE to draw them, or you auto-lose to Purrely, no questions asked. I'm quite at a loss on how to deal with this deck, perhaps the only way is to reap it before it even hits the board.
Bricking - Master Duel is a game of consistency. The player who is able to make full use of their 5 card hand means all the difference. A poker compairson would be like hitting a straight verus a flush in poker. This makes bricking a serious issue since you don't even have a proper hand, you are fighting with at best King-high versus an opponent's full house.
Written 231006
Author-kun
HouseDelaroux.com
[1] [non-overlapping starters] - Starters that come from different archetypes
