How to win at YuGiOh.

I’m doing this to prove how simple it is to become very good at YuGiOh.

To win at YuGiOh, or any other game, you’ve got to understand the way it is possible to win the game. In YuGiOh, to win you game you must reduce your opponent’s life points to zero. In order to do this you usually have to attack your opponent with a strong monster or constantly kill of their smaller monster with your bigger monster. (as you cannot attack you opponent while he has monsters on the field)
This leads to strategy number 1:

• HAVE A MASSIVE MONSTER THAT DOESN’T DIE, GET IT OUT ASAP and BEAT THEIR FACE IN!
This strategy is pretty straight forward. Find some way to special summon (cause no-one bothers normal summoning things these days) a creature stronger than any creature in your opponent’s deck and don’t let it die. (Try and find a creature that isn’t affected by spells or traps to make it even more indestructible). A really good Massive Monster deck wins on their first turn, so they’re opponent can’t do anything.

However, this strategy is often beaten by Control based strategies. These are usually the all rounder style strategies. This is due to the fact that control based strategies don’t rely heavily on having the monster with the highest attack, but rather have spells and traps that can easily deal with monsters. They are particularly good against Massive Monster strategies as most massive monsters in the game can be easily removed by a simple trap and leave your opponent defenseless and out of resources (they usually pour all their resources into getting out their massive creature). Control based strategies also rely on stopping your opponent’s spells and traps and often need cards like Mystical Space Typhoon to stop dying by a crushing trap or continuous magic card. However control strategies still need to get out some kind of large-ish creature to make sure that your opponent’s 4 star creatures can’t kill your creatures. When I turned my zombie deck into a controlling style strategy, I hardly ever lost a game. My win rate was about 9/10 games.

Another popular strategy is Combo based strategies. These strategies often rely on a few copies of very important cards, which, when combined are insanely strong. However, their biggest weakness is Control style decks, as the control decks are often able to remove the combo before the combo deck can pull it off. An example of a combo that works is a 2x Zombie Master/ Cannon Soldier deck which creates an infinite combo allowing you to sacrifice creatures indefinitely and deal damage to your opponent for every creature you sacrifice (winning you the game instantly).

Despite control style strategies being very powerful and flexible, Evasive decks can often evade control and death and win the game through creature abilities. A good example of this is the Rock based Flip decks, which use puny creatures in defense mode and prevent your opponent from attacking them or you. They stall using cards like Ordeal of the Traveller (which is SUPER STUPID OVERPOWERED) and Swords of Revealing light and then keep flipping up their monsters to return monsters to your hand and slowly kill you with direct damage. Evasive decks are particularly good because most monster killing cards only affect face up creatures. Because these creatures are in face down defense mode they can’t be killed by the control style cards. These decks are by far the toughest decks to beat, as they warp the typical way to win the game, so it no longer becomes a test of who is attacking with the best monster but instead is a test of whether or not the Evasive strategy can get itself going before it loses. After a certain time, these evasive decks become pretty much unbeatable, so watch out for them. Luckily cards like Nobelman of Crossout and Divine (punishment or judgment or something) stop these evasive decks from winning.

The second last strategy is relatively rare, but still used. It’s a Lock Down strategy. This strategy is basically playing a bunch of cards that prevent your opponent from playing any spells or traps and then stopping them from being able to stop you. The best way to combat these strategies is have Monsters that have abilities that kill your opponent’s monsters or remove them from the game.

The final strategy is very rare; it’s an Alternate Winning Condition strategy. These strategies rely on cards like Exodia, the Forbidden One and Final Countdown to let them able to win a different way from normal. The best way to counter this strategy is with some good spell and trap negating cards or kill your opponent quickly. They’re not bad against Evasive decks.


Just a general note: If you want to become a pro in YuGiOh, you’ve got to be committed and willing to spend lots of money. Just like a Car racer, it doesn’t matter how good the racer is, if he doesn’t have a car that’s up to scratch with the rest of the competition he simply will not be able to go as fast and will lose. This just like YuGiOh, if you are not willing to spend big money to buy the best cards, you will lose to decks with better cards. That’s just the sad fact. This is something I was never willing to do, as, after all they’re just piece of cardboard.