The Starter Deck Phase - A Retrospective
Since the "Free-Card Starter Deck" phase is over, now is the perfect time for a retrospective.
Day 1 - Vs Slifer Reds
I played a few games with the starter deck before going to class. The 1200 ATK beaters were far from optimal, but the sub 1100 ATK ones were just egregious. Though it was great to see how most Slifers at the dorm were actually balanced for this kind of Deck.
So the first upgrade was already very satisfying: I got three 1500 ATK beaters from Crowler and bought one pack each from the beginner sets, which netted me two usable Traps. This was already a sizeable improvement and allowed me to duel the rest of the Slifers, winning against most of them.
Day 2 - Vs Ra Yellows
Wednesday is Water Pack day, so I just had to buy one and actually got Treeborn Frog and Mermaid Knight, two cards that turned out to be among the strongest in my deck. The new Spells and Traps were all from Crowler. He even gave me my first proper 1-for-1 removal: Fissure.
Which made me ballsy enough to challenge the Ra Yellows, but winning was more of a coin flip or “draw the out” kind of thing. The difficulty spike was noticeable here, due to them at least playing staple Spells and Traps.
Day 3 and 4 Vs Jank Connoisseur
Since the Ra Yellows were a major step up from the Slifers, I opted to enjoy my time with my boys Jellyfish and Fiend Kraken and Slifer Fusion jank while it still posed a bit of a challenge. Very enjoyable, and it already yielded the first deck recipes.
Also this part made me reflect on how my challenge run made me interact with the game. Since buying any amount of packs makes most of the Slifers trivial, heck, even the free cards already made most of them very manageable
Day 5 Vs Ra Yellows - Round 2
This is the final form of the free cards (+5 booster packs) deck. It plays already so much better than the starter deck and is somewhere between Slifer Red and Ra Yellow depending on the individual duelists. The main pain point now is that their decks have staples and just plain better stat lines, which makes everything an uphill battle.
I got some more Slifer recipes that day. The next day was the first Tag Duel Sunday with Syrus, which is a whole other story. At this point I was looking forward to upgrading my deck with some Fusion goodness of my own in Week 2.
Week 2 Vs Obelisk Blue and Teachers
After the disaster that was Tag Dueling with Syrus, Fusion packs unlocked at the start of Week 2, so I added a little package to my deck and tried my luck against the Obelisk Blues.
Just adding the Thunder Dragons made my neurons activate, because my deck can now go +1 just to later go -2 for a Fusion beatstick. Wonderful.
I won surprisingly many of the duels against them, most notably against Turtle Boy and the Attribute Guardians. I tried the teachers (and Jinzo!) two days later and had a 50% win rate against them.
Mussing
Limiting access to cards, taking screenshots, and writing little BlueSky entries made me slow down and appreciate parts of the game I’d normally steamroll through. I really enjoyed all the thematic decks the Slifers (and some others) had, and it was a delight to see all these barely useful early Fusion and Ritual Boss Monsters, as well as Fushioh Richie mind you.
I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
Project Update / Format Shift
Commentary will continue exclusivly on BlueSky.
On here I want to move more towards composed and longer entries. There is so much to say about this first entry of the Tag Force series on its own, and in relation to the other titles.
I’m looking forward to making Duelist spotlights (of the Attribute Guardians and all the Fusion decks among others), interesting localization stuff, and whatever else I’ll find.
