Sunday, June 3, 2012

Importance of Life Points

So today we are going into abit of theory.

Most people had the idea that Yugioh was simply all about card advantage.

I admit I had the mentality and i had based alot of my playstyles on focusing on card advantage in my games and disregarding lifepoints. If i didnt die, i didnt care.

But its not the old Goat control formats anymore where it is very frequent where you can dish 5000 to 8000 damage at one go and card advantage was the way to go.

The new Yugioh has infinite special summon possiblities so people can put as much damage on the field as possible.

That is why we must consider our life points too.

Consider this situation: You could have a full card advantage of 5 to your opponents 1. lets say your hand has 2 hornet, 1 gruff, 1 mantis, 1 inzektor.

Your opponent has a face down Warning or Torrential on the field. You summon your Inzektor and he Warnings. Lets say you have only 1000 life points because you disregarded life points.

Your opponent proceeds to topdeck a monster and whack you and you lose. What can you say about that?

I noticed the importance of lifepoints during my rounds from the past 3 tournaments. I sometimes lost to people due to low lifepoints although I had a larger card/hand advantage.

But I decided to ignore it because majority of my rounds where I applied the same playstyle, i still won.

But I had to learn the hard way yesterday when i died to my own playstyle of focusing purely on advantage. I focused my loss on to the 3 Trooper attacks that I sustained in early game. 5000 + lifepoints is not cheap mind you.

Advantage is one of the most unique aspects of Yugioh because besides MTG or Legend of the 5 rings , no other card game calls for you to maintain advantage so much. But now Yugioh has alot of bullshit stuff like Monster Reborn, Hieratics and Inzektor which can OTK you out of the blue, and new decks like Sea Serpent which can OTK easily are popping up so we must conserve lifepoints. I admit I do not like CFVG mainly because of the fact that you had to consider life and as YGO players its hard for us since we mainly considered advantage more (maybe a 75%: 25% ratio) but in CFVG you need to consider both equally. Im sure the TCG players can relate to all this OTK stuff when everyone is playing Chaos Dragons everywhere.

And this is the reason why Solemn Warning is becoming more dangerous to play in Malaysia and its not so much of a staple anymore. Because of its lifepoint cost. If you sustain Card Trooper's attack and pay for Warning you will have lost 1/2 your life points. Which is dangerous as Hieratics only need to put out 1 Red Eyes to win and Inzektor only have to focus on making Volcasaurus.

The LP argument makes Machina Gadget very dangerous because people can just summon gadget and you decide not to waste traps and they just whack you for 1000 + damage. No further explanation because everyone is familiar with it.

And at the same time, this is why Card Trooper is a very good pick in todays meta. Playing Trooper early game against a control player stops them in their tracks immediately because they wont waste resources on killing Trooper, and in the process, Trooper will successfully attack once and wipe out 1/4 of their total life.

That's all for today and take time to reconsider today's post :)

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Even though I'm not in the OCG environment anymore, I can see the validity and importance of the trooper argument. I'd say that I would fall victim to leaving trooper to survive too. But I only prepare to drop myself down really low when I'm going to lose otherwise, or know that I can establish enough control to win.

mike9944 said...

Yeah i was something like what you discussed earlier. I still kinda am, but i decided to capitalize off other opponents like me o.o

Dominic said...

Hey bro, will you still be around KL next week? I'll be going there on Tuesday. :)

mike9944 said...

im in selangor not KL. but ya.

Ventus said...

Good read Mike! Just had an argument with a player at my locals that Warning is far from being staple this format. He said everybody plays it, while I responded most of the people don't even know why and he called me nuts kicking Warning out of my line up.

These thoughts you have are exactly what I experienced with the beginning of the format ...though I think its even more applicable in the OCG than in the TCG but yh in most match ups its the same here too.,

mike9944 said...

errr...i actually think that its a staple in the TCG because of tour guide and rabbit and because Hieratics doesnt exist much over there :/

TheTCGLover said...

It's well accepted that life points are significant. But if you can expend some of these points to keep an advantage and win, then It does not matter if you go down to 1 life point. It's when your life point expending card gets negated that you need to worry. Fortunately Gorz can help out when that does happen.