Anime Your local metagame, and how it's affected your playing style

[Kakashi]

This is generally interesting to think about and discuss. Naturally in tournaments you take into account what's popular in the game as a whole, but in casual play, things can be a little different.

What kind of decks do people play where you are, and how have new cards being introduced and what's popular shaped your deck? Have there been any drastic changes in the game where you are?

As an example, a change that has happened locally where I am over the past year or so:

Before the release of the Pegasus starter deck, M/T removal was pretty scarce; most people couldn't afford to go and spend a lot of money on UR MSTs and generally just stuck with whatever they could get their hands on, or didn't bother with removal. It was pretty rare to see a deck with anything more than a Heavy Storm and Giant Trunade. Sad, but that's the way things were. Due to the lack of decent M/T removal, most people ran beatdowns that were very heavy on equips; people would run Malevolent Nuzzlers (commonplace), Horn of the Unicorn, Sword of Deep-seated...anything that could boost their monsters.

Then came the new Starters. Those who could ordered 3 MSTs as singles; others just got the decks. Those that couldn't be bothered going out and buying the decks started decking their old De-spells and Remove Traps to try and adjust to the changing environment. This introduced a great deal more M/T removal than there had been before; suddenly, equip cards weren't lasting as long as they used to. They started seeing less play.

Anyway, that's just an example of how a metagame can change.

Around here, a lot of people play the same decks they always have; themeless 50 card beatdowns, with the occasional new 1800+ monster added in. They run more M/T removal and less equips than they used to, as I mentioned before.

How has this shaped my deck? I try to vary my decks, so that I'm not playing the same boring beatdown the next person is. My trap count is lower than just about everyone else's, with chainable traps being preferrable to triggered ones. I run very few equips, and only use a field card (Necrovalley) with my Gravekeepers. This was intended to leave my decks less vulnerable to the increasing popularity of M/T removal locally. If it hadn't become popular, I may only have made adjustments for removal in preparation for tournaments, since there would have been no need in casual play.

I'm afraid I'm starting to waffle (as I do when I try to give a lot of substance to my posts), so I'll let the next poster talk about their local environment.

[LastSheikah]

There are only four real Duelists in this area. FOUR!!! Count 'em! FOUR!!!! I know that, because there are only two schools here, and I've been to both very recently. :sweat:
I'm one of the duelists here, and I use a Dark theme deck with very few equipment cards. I usually just rely on Mystic Plasma Zone, my trusty Monster cards, and a bunch of M/T cards to pull me out of a tight spot.
One of my best friends has a Dragon theme deck, and with the Blue Eyes White Dragon, Lord of D., Slifer the Sky Dragon, (it's only casual play, no tournaments here.:bawl: ) and such, he's pretty tough.
The next Duelist here is a newbie to the game, but she's pretty good. She started with a Joey theme deck, but I helped her make it into a Water/Wind theme deck. (She absolutely begged for a deck that would be good for her "precious" penguin cards. *sigh* She loves that Penguin Soldier.)
The last just has a deck that's basically like Yugi's: all over the place, but still a fairly good deck. He has lots of fusion monsters, so I suppose it could be called a fusion deck...The only problem is he gets tempermental when he duels...
Yep, that's pretty much it around here.

[Guest Alucardfire]

Well with really good and competitive duelists in my area Japanese and English I prefer to keep my decks consistent and speedy. Control and hand disruption is what people play now to counter straight beatdown, and the skilled beatdown players formed aggression decks also known as 'aggro' in the Asian metagame.

[Domon]

[COLOR=darkblue][SIZE=1]My area tends to change everytime a new set is released and its very annoying. But right now I'd have to say that most people I know are running Tribe-Infecting Virus because of the monster elimination capabilities, Skilled Dark Magician and Skilled White are getting used a lot for Dark Paladin decks, I'm currently using a Skilled White because of his element, I needed a decent Light type hitter and Thunder Nyan Nyan is too much of a gamble to me, Also Breaker hits a few decks, but people are reverting back to Heavy Storm and Harpie's Feather Duster, I prefer Breaker over MST simply because he's a monster and his effect cannot be negated, also if you use a Pitch Black Power Stone in conjuction to him you can wipe out up to four M/T cards, it maybe slow but still its pretty decent.

Anyways, I think that once Dark Crisis is released I'll see more people going for either hand control decks, burn decks, or running highly improved beatdown decks. I'll go and try and make a Light deck with quite a few of the newer monsters from Dark Crisis. I mean I say that Hand Control and Burn decks will become more of a norm because of Vampire Lord, Reflect Bounder, and Judgement of Anubis just to name a few, that's why I think Barrel Behind the Door/Trap Of Curse Eraser will become a must for a lot of decks, I know I'll be running two Barrels still.

I still though must say that Dark Magician decks are very behind the Japanese ones, I mean come on, if Konami and Upperdeck really want to get some things popular they should at least put more cards in games as promos, like give us five or four cards in a game as the promos. But oh well, that's just me. I think though that Jinzo will become a duelists best friends in those long hard duels against decks that have Judgement of Anubis *shudders*.[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[Guest Alucardfire]

Well why conflict between Breaker and MST? They're both staples so why not just run both?