Dispelling the myth - Tearlament is NOT a complex deck...IN MASTER DUEL. CMV

[Papa Smurf]

As much as I'd like to believe that figuring out the deck in less than a day makes me some kind of galaxy brain IQ...It just isn;t true.

Mill, make Kit. Mill 8 feel great. Make Rulkallos, now you're Nibiru-proof! If you can, make Dweller before using Ishizu cards. Make Kaleidoheart. If you're an A-Hole make Winda. Opponents turn make Dragostapelia after using up your interactions. That's it. That's the deck. it's flowchart af. The only slightly complex part of the deck is knowing the best search/foolish from Kit based on what you have.

But what about the galaxy brain mirror match?

Uhh...Hope you mill your shufflers and they don't. That's it.

In the TCG it was a complex deck because of its Tier 0 status and side-decking, which meant the match-up was constantly evolving. Master Duel is a fairly casual game, so that isn;t really a thing here since people will always be playing their pet decks, even in a 'Tier 0' format. Controversial opinion time - Tier 0 doesn;t exist in Master Duel because it isn;t competitive. No point building around just the mirror match when people will always be playing jank.

In both formats the deck was considered complex because it was difficult to keep track of all the mills and activations. In Master Duel, the game does that for you. EZ PZ.

In both formats the archetype led to cheating because of bad card design (searching then shuffling, even if you didn;t have a target in deck to search, because that's private knowledge). In Master Duel, it's automated so we don;t need to worry about that either.

So remind me again - why is this deck supposed to be complicated when it's about as flowchart as it gets? Decks like Adamancipator and Pendulums are complex because they have multiple non-standard lines of play based on the resources they have available to them - it takes considerable knowledge to maximise the potential of the resources you can use. Tears are pretty much always doing the same thing.

Change my View.

Edit: ngl, proud of this community right now! My post was kind of a hot take, but I've seen nothing but intelligent, respectful discussion in this thread so far. You guys rock.

Edit 2: Can't post any more for now because I haven't spent enough money on this account. Y'all have fun and keep it civil - this has been a great discussion so far!

[Japoński Anon]

Papa Smurf님이 먼저 게시:

Japoński Anon님이 먼저 게시:

Is ishizu really that interactive? They play during your turn while you set up and the shufflers basically kill anything you have in the gy, thereby preventing interaction.

Ishizu cards were definitely a mistake, but I do think decks being able to play on both turns would be a cool natural progression and solution to deal with the coin-flip meta we usually have. Can understand if others don't agree though.

I think from a design perspective, it would be difficult to have this occur without proper resource management which some decks tend to ignore. You would also have to make boss monsters resistant to opponent plays during your turn with cards like Barrone, but I think this sort of design philosophy will speed up the game considerably if not done right. I think making more hand traps that support archetypes and attributes that provide a little bit more utility and can be a starter or a normal brick would be a good way to approach that, but I think Konami needs to slow down the game with mechanics like link arrows to keep the game healthy and engaging so we can have longer and more drawn out games as opposed to the games that last about 2 to three turns that we have now.

[Papa Smurf]

Japoński Anon님이 먼저 게시:

Papa Smurf님이 먼저 게시:

Ishizu cards were definitely a mistake, but I do think decks being able to play on both turns would be a cool natural progression and solution to deal with the coin-flip meta we usually have. Can understand if others don't agree though.

I think from a design perspective, it would be difficult to have this occur without proper resource management which some decks tend to ignore. You would also have to make boss monsters resistant to opponent plays during your turn with cards like Barrone, but I think this sort of design philosophy will speed up the game considerably if not done right. I think making more hand traps that support archetypes and attributes that provide a little bit more utility and can be a starter or a normal brick would be a good way to approach that, but I think Konami needs to slow down the game with mechanics like link arrows to keep the game healthy and engaging so we can have longer and more drawn out games as opposed to the games that last about 2 to three turns that we have now.

Isn't speeding up the game the natural progression of Yugioh though? it seems like how the game is designed, for better or worse. Interactions on both turns could hopefully improve duel lengths due to the back-and-forth it could provide.

[Japoński Anon]

Papa Smurf님이 먼저 게시:

Japoński Anon님이 먼저 게시:

I think from a design perspective, it would be difficult to have this occur without proper resource management which some decks tend to ignore. You would also have to make boss monsters resistant to opponent plays during your turn with cards like Barrone, but I think this sort of design philosophy will speed up the game considerably if not done right. I think making more hand traps that support archetypes and attributes that provide a little bit more utility and can be a starter or a normal brick would be a good way to approach that, but I think Konami needs to slow down the game with mechanics like link arrows to keep the game healthy and engaging so we can have longer and more drawn out games as opposed to the games that last about 2 to three turns that we have now.

Isn't speeding up the game the natural progression of Yugioh though? it seems like how the game is designed, for better or worse. Interactions on both turns could hopefully improve duel lengths due to the back-and-forth it could provide.

In Master rule 4, extra deck monsters could only be summoned into the extra monster zone or into link arrow zones. This massively capped the power ceiling of decks since it made it made deck building more constrictive since several engines could not be used and you would have to plan out your board appropriately. Links had several issues. The first issue was links became an enabler for even worse plays. Link 1s sacking cards and causing floating effects. link 2 extenders and enablers like Verte, union carrier, and Halq. Then you had link packages that could be splashed into any deck because Konami wanted to sell cards and putting summoning restrictions on cards to cap their splash ability would hurt sales on a card type that people disliked since they were forced to play them to play their favorite decks. As such link plays became extremely centralized and many peoples extra decks across many achetypes had identical link monsters, allowing them to do things like access code for game and in turn speeding up the game as a whole. Its a massive shame that link monsters didn't serve their intended purpose in slowing down the game and we didn't get backrow with link arrows to also allow non-link decks to play without links.

[Papa Smurf]

Japoński Anon님이 먼저 게시:

Papa Smurf님이 먼저 게시:

Isn't speeding up the game the natural progression of Yugioh though? it seems like how the game is designed, for better or worse. Interactions on both turns could hopefully improve duel lengths due to the back-and-forth it could provide.

In Master rule 4, extra deck monsters could only be summoned into the extra monster zone or into link arrow zones. This massively capped the power ceiling of decks since it made it made deck building more constrictive since several engines could not be used and you would have to plan out your board appropriately. Links had several issues. The first issue was links became an enabler for even worse plays. Link 1s sacking cards and causing floating effects. link 2 extenders and enablers like Verte, union carrier, and Halq. Then you had link packages that could be splashed into any deck because Konami wanted to sell cards and putting summoning restrictions on cards to cap their splash ability would hurt sales on a card type that people disliked since they were forced to play them to play their favorite decks. As such link plays became extremely centralized and many peoples extra decks across many achetypes had identical link monsters, allowing them to do things like access code for game and in turn speeding up the game as a whole. Its a massive shame that link monsters didn't serve their intended purpose in slowing down the game and we didn't get backrow with link arrows to also allow non-link decks to play without links.

MR4 almost killed the game though through forcing a mechanic, I don't think that's the solution. People play Yugioh because of the freedom it has over other card games.

[Japoński Anon]

Papa Smurf님이 먼저 게시:

Japoński Anon님이 먼저 게시:

In Master rule 4, extra deck monsters could only be summoned into the extra monster zone or into link arrow zones. This massively capped the power ceiling of decks since it made it made deck building more constrictive since several engines could not be used and you would have to plan out your board appropriately. Links had several issues. The first issue was links became an enabler for even worse plays. Link 1s sacking cards and causing floating effects. link 2 extenders and enablers like Verte, union carrier, and Halq. Then you had link packages that could be splashed into any deck because Konami wanted to sell cards and putting summoning restrictions on cards to cap their splash ability would hurt sales on a card type that people disliked since they were forced to play them to play their favorite decks. As such link plays became extremely centralized and many peoples extra decks across many achetypes had identical link monsters, allowing them to do things like access code for game and in turn speeding up the game as a whole. Its a massive shame that link monsters didn't serve their intended purpose in slowing down the game and we didn't get backrow with link arrows to also allow non-link decks to play without links.

MR4 almost killed the game though through forcing a mechanic, I don't think that's the solution. People play Yugioh because of the freedom it has over other card games.

Master rule 3 and the era around it almost killed the game. Pends on release were far worse than links ever were and sped up the game to unsustainable levels. While you weren't forced to play pends and there were plenty of decks that functioned without them, the tempo of play that players would have to anticipate strongly impacted deck building. While I agree that forcing people to play links is bad, the link arrows mechanic was promising and if arrows weren't just on link monsters, the mechanic would have been received much better(link arrows on continuous spell/traps, pends, field spells, etc.)

[C.C. 折オリ枝 の 夫]

Japoński Anon님이 먼저 게시:

Papa Smurf님이 먼저 게시:

Isn't speeding up the game the natural progression of Yugioh though? it seems like how the game is designed, for better or worse. Interactions on both turns could hopefully improve duel lengths due to the back-and-forth it could provide.

In Master rule 4, extra deck monsters could only be summoned into the extra monster zone or into link arrow zones. This massively capped the power ceiling of decks since it made it made deck building more constrictive since several engines could not be used and you would have to plan out your board appropriately. Links had several issues. The first issue was links became an enabler for even worse plays. Link 1s sacking cards and causing floating effects. link 2 extenders and enablers like Verte, union carrier, and Halq. Then you had link packages that could be splashed into any deck because Konami wanted to sell cards and putting summoning restrictions on cards to cap their splash ability would hurt sales on a card type that people disliked since they were forced to play them to play their favorite decks. As such link plays became extremely centralized and many peoples extra decks across many achetypes had identical link monsters, allowing them to do things like access code for game and in turn speeding up the game as a whole. Its a massive shame that link monsters didn't serve their intended purpose in slowing down the game and we didn't get backrow with link arrows to also allow non-link decks to play without links.

The backlash from the community was massive enough to change Konami's mind about limiting player's freedom like that, so I doubt it'll ever happen again that we get something like that.

[Papa Smurf]

Japoński Anon님이 먼저 게시:

Papa Smurf님이 먼저 게시:

MR4 almost killed the game though through forcing a mechanic, I don't think that's the solution. People play Yugioh because of the freedom it has over other card games.

Master rule 3 and the era around it almost killed the game. Pends on release were far worse than links ever were and sped up the game to unsustainable levels. While you weren't forced to play pends and there were plenty of decks that functioned without them, the tempo of play that players would have to anticipate strongly impacted deck building. While I agree that forcing people to play links is bad, the link arrows mechanic was promising and if arrows weren't just on link monsters, the mechanic would have been received much better(link arrows on continuous spell/traps, pends, field spells, etc.)

It was a good idea in theory to introduce something like a resource mechanic to the game -problem was Konami was Komoney and used it as an excuse to force people to buy product or die.

[Japoński Anon]

It's been 5+ years since links have released and I don't think it is unreasonable to reintroduce link arrows provided that they provide more access to link arrows, though this is more of theory crafting new mechanics rather fixing this awful tear meta. Solution now is just murdering all the shufflers and the mill ishizus to control the power ceiling of mill strategies.

[Astrallight]

I would like to see how people resolve a chain 16 in real life duels with Tear. Have fun remembering every chain you and your opponent did. Atleast in MD you got a server telling you what you can do and cant and remember every chain both of you did in a turn.

I can not imagine trying to remember every chain in a real duel.

[Terminal Desolation]

The deck is easy to pilot and win versus most decks, I don't think that's a question. I would say the average "click yes turbo" player can probably still win 75% of their duels that aren't the mirror on match up alone. The mirror will usually still come down to who is most skilled, however. You can see this in some of the content creators - folks who are known to be good, like PakTCG, pretty much wins every mirror, even going second, barring the luck factor.

MD certainly can be competitive, and I'd argue that it tends to be at least reasonably competitive in Diamond. If you're seeing pet decks in Diamond, they're usually also legitimately good, like SPYRAL. I think a good example of this is HardLeg on Youtube. He has a series where every month he tries to get Diamond 1 with various archetypes, never meta stuff, always jank. I won't spoil any episodes, but he's not guaranteed to even make it to Diamond, and I don't recall any where he actually reaches Diamond 1. From my personal experience, the amount of truly off-meta decks in Diamond is minimal.

Tear is certainly good enough to auto-pilot directly into Diamond 5, but given how many players are coming back to have fun with Tears, I would be surprised if they could make it much further without getting match up wins, playing someone who's still saving up for Tears or something.

As for the "MD tracks everything for you, so it's easy to remember," I disagree. Given how long some of these turns go on, it's not uncommon for me to have to think about whether or not I've already used some of my HOPTs, and that's not even considering that in Tear, you have to remember whether WHOSE Havniss activated, because someone's did... It's still very easy to lose track, and I'd argue that losing track in MD is more punishing than in paper. Considering how crazy the chains and turns get in Tear mirrors, I would not be surprised if frequently players and judges forgot that a certain name had activated, letting a player, say, proc Havniss twice, because everyone forgot it was already used in Draw Phase or something. MD does not have that leniency. It will call you on any mistakes you make. It remembers. IT KNOWS.

[Yerc2]

Are there any decks that require skill or thought?
The meta has been kinda barren in that regard for quite a while.

I would say that complexity comes from weighing options. risk management, and trying to play around your opponent's cards.
It usually clear as day what would be your best action.

[Japoński Anon]

Yerc2님이 먼저 게시:

Are there any decks that require skill or thought?
The meta has been kinda barren in that regard for quite a while.

I would say that complexity comes from weighing options. risk management, and trying to play around your opponent's cards.
It usually clear as day what would be your best action.

Sky Strikers. You have a diverse tool-kit and you have multiple paths to victory. You can use shark cannon to revive a barone and use it for it's pop and omni negate or you can link climb into access code. Though in the current meta with the ishizus they are completely unplayable.

[Papa Shekels]

Aldain님이 먼저 게시:

No, because that defeats the purpose of turns altogether imo.

If anyone can do anything at any time, what is the point of turns in the first place?

What's the point of a deck and a draw phase when you're just milling everything and doing 12 chains off of that?

When you have everything available at almost all times and only the worst of the worst mills can screw you...what's even left? What's the point?

I know I may not be right and I'm not trying to say it can't or shouldn't be fun for people, but all I see is something so apathetic to any form of game structure that it might as well just be some homebrew rules thrown together without a care in the world.

I look at it this way: turns still matter, because A) all those cards (thankfully) still abide by the sole restriction of hard once per turns, so turn change is basically resetting the slate for that, and B) turn player still gets slightly more chance to play with their draw, normal summon, and priority. It blurs the line between player turns but still has a bit of that line in there. Which for some people is a lot more fun than one person spending a few minutes setting up their board and second person spending a few minutes breaking that board and setting up their own. It's a different style of playing and I 100% think full power ishizu tear mirrors will be a legacy format someday. My only real gripe with it is that its existence in a format just excludes pretty much every other option when the formats before and after it were much more varied, to the point where it's 2023 and we have a deck that sets 5 and passes topping tournaments

[Drago]

Yerc2님이 먼저 게시:

Are there any decks that require skill or thought?
The meta has been kinda barren in that regard for quite a while.

I would say that complexity comes from weighing options. risk management, and trying to play around your opponent's cards.
It usually clear as day what would be your best action.

Try Rikka, very little spell/trap resistance, but a very good monster control if you know how to manage your board.

[C.C. 折オリ枝 の 夫]

After doing some Tearlaments mirrors against people know aren't "oh, I didn't go first? scoop", yea....this deck does require a a certain about of processing power for it's skill ceiling.

I lost both my matches against the mirror, and I can safely say that, after watching the replays a bit, my own stupidity lost me the matches. Small misplays here and there added up and it got me to a point of no return.