YuGiOh! - MARIK STRUCTURE DECK

Can I get a hug?

The Marik structure deck is coming out soon, and it's going to have some EXCITING things.

The most notable is the fact that MIRROR FORCE IS BECOMING COMMON. Mirror Force, often a $40 card, is going to be available along with a SLEW of other useful cards for about $10 in the Marik Structure Deck.

Aside from Mirror Force, the Marik Structure Deck will also allow easy access to...

Guardian Sphinx
A Cat of Ill Omen
Lava Golem
Mystical Space Typhoon
Card of Safe Return
Creature Swap
Mother Grizzly
Rush Recklessly
Staunch Defender
Compulsory Evacuation Device

... And many more!

I'm particularly looking forward to Mirror Force, A Cat of Ill Omen, Lava Golem, Rush Recklessly, and Staunch Defender! Ten bucks for all that awesomeness and more? Hell yeah.

Those cards were all easy to get your hands on... And half of them sucked anyway. Though.... I <3 my Shiny Mirror Force. And MST. And Change Of Heart. And... zzz

Akubarix wrote:Those cards were all easy to get your hands on... And half of them sucked anyway. Though.... I <3 my Shiny Mirror Force. And MST. And Change Of Heart. And... zzz

Actually, Mirror Force, as I said, is a $40 card right now. None of the cards I listed "suck" by any definition, considering that there are several decks which make excellent use of all of them.

Guardian Sphinx: Five-star, one tribute monster that can bounce the opponent's entire front row when it Flips? The time it takes to get this effect off can be troublesome, and often, you only need to worry about enough creatures that a Compulsory can deal with them, but the ENTIRE front row? That's cool.

A Cat of Ill Omen: A lot of trap-heavy decks like Skill Drain, Royal Oppression, and Imperial Iron Wall run this card just to get the cards they need faster. Imperial Iron Wall is an important card for an OTK (one-turn kill) deck based around a Quillbolt Loop, in which you continually special summon and tribute a single Quillbolt Hedgehog to something like Mass Driver or Cannon Soldier. However, in order for the loop to work, you NEED an Imperial Iron Wall. A Cat of Ill Omen just ensures your chances of getting one on the field.

Lava Golem: Lava Golem is used in a lot of OTKs, and is just plain nifty. You hand the opponent a 3000 Atk beatstick by tributing THEIR monsters. You can get rid of Stardust Dragon, Goyo Guardian, Jinzo, etc, etc by doing this. Not only do you get to clear out the enemy's front row pretty well, but they take 1000 life point damage during each of their standby phases. Lava Golem's nice in a lot of decks- Amazoness Swords Woman loves it.

Mystical Space Typhoon: Staple card. You can never have too many.

Card of Safe Return: In several decks, this card offers some ridiculous draw power, and as anyone who has ever played a card game could tell you, card advantage is VERY important.

Creature Swap: Again, a lot of decks make wonderful use of this card. Each player picks a creature and, well, swaps them! If you give the enemy a puny little fetch monster (Sangan, Shining Angel, etc), you get to destroy it for some easy life-point damage, and you STILL get to search, because the cards specify that the owner of the card may search, not the controller. There are a LOT of fun tricks you can do with a Creature Swap.

Mother Grizzly: A fetch card. There's no reason not to get a few in case you end up building some kind of Water deck.

Rush Recklessly: Sometimes considered a staple. Rush Recklessly is just plain useful in a lot of decks- Amazoness, Gadgets, they all love it. An extra 700 Atk that the opponent didn't originally prepare for? What's not to love? 700 Atk is a big boost for what it's worth, and it's a wonderful advantage for monsters like Lord British Space Fighter or Victory Viper XX03.

Staunch Defender: What could be better, honestly? You get to decide what your opponent attacks if they attempt to do so, and they all HAVE to attack that one monster you choose. Amazoness Swords Woman with a Mist Body or an Amazoness Queen on the field loves being swung into by bigger monsters, and loves swinging back into them. It's like a Ring of Magnetism they didn't see coming.

Compulsory Evacuation Device: One of the best cards ever, in my opinion. I love this card. It's so simple, versatile, and effective that it's ridiculous. You can bounce an opponent's monster back to their Extra deck that they just synchro summoned or fused for, you can bounce a monster that's getting ready to kill you (easily stops a lot of OTK decks), you can save one of your own monsters from destruction, etc, etc... Compulsory just keeps getting better the more you play with it and experiment with what it can do.

Yeah, most of the Marik structure deck sucks, but there are PLENTY of cards worth getting it for. Again, Mirror Force is a $40 fucking dollar card, and you can get that and MORE for $10? For that ONE card alone, you're already paying a fourth of the price, and then they throw everything else in there, too.

Proof that Konami loves us.

I always thought of Konami more of like an abusive parent who buys you things occasionally to "prove that they're nice". Rather than loving you. Given how often most of my friends complain about things related to the card game.

I think I actually have a Mirror Force or two lying around...in fact, I have a surprisingly large amount of those cards.

Zenith wrote:I always thought of Konami more of like an abusive parent who buys you things occasionally to "prove that they're nice". Rather than loving you. Given how often most of my friends complain about things related to the card game.

I think I actually have a Mirror Force or two lying around...in fact, I have a surprisingly large amount of those cards.

Hold onto 'em. Mirror Force are fantastic, of course, and cards never go out of rotation in YuGiOh like in Magic or Pokemon. There are just banned/limited/semi-limited cards.

Shine wrote:Hold onto 'em. Mirror Force are fantastic, of course, and cards never go out of rotation in YuGiOh like in Magic or Pokemon. There are just banned/limited/semi-limited cards.

..That means cards go out of rotation. Even if it's just one banned card, it's out. Frankly, I think it's down right stupid to BAN Monster Reborn of all things. Let alone Change of Heart..... But give EVERYONE a MIRROR FORCE.

As for it (MF) being a $40 card... That's if you're gullible enough to believe a piece of paper with foil backing is worth that much. Frankly, for $40 you could buy booster packs and just hope to land it. Not to mention the chance of getting some other pimp cards.

Let me 'correct' my last statement. No one I know or have ever played with had any problem getting their hands on the mentioned cards given the exclusions in the brackets of my last post.


This is completely unrelated, but I believe 1 turn kill decks (Read: "It's my first turn? I WIN LOLZ") are the sole reason why I can't stand "competitive" players. Not to mention they throw "THIS IS BANNED" in my face. Fuck you Konami and you competitive pricks. It's in my deck, deal the fuck with it.

More so, how the hell did JINZO get ANOTHER slot? He was a 1 slot monster when I played. So now they think it's okay to run TWO per deck? What the balls was Konami thinking? In between making Metal Gears and horrible dance games, you'd think they'd just... Not piss off their only trading card fan base.

Heh... Lava Golem... HAHAHAHAHA

Akubarix wrote:

Shine wrote:Hold onto 'em. Mirror Force are fantastic, of course, and cards never go out of rotation in YuGiOh like in Magic or Pokemon. There are just banned/limited/semi-limited cards.

..That means cards go out of rotation. Even if it's just one banned card, it's out. Frankly, I think it's down right stupid to BAN Monster Reborn of all things. Let alone Change of Heart..... But give EVERYONE a MIRROR FORCE.

As for it (MF) being a $40 card... That's if you're gullible enough to believe a piece of paper with foil backing is worth that much. Frankly, for $40 you could buy booster packs and just hope to land it. Not to mention the chance of getting some other pimp cards.

Let me 'correct' my last statement. No one I know or have ever played with had any problem getting their hands on the mentioned cards given the exclusions in the brackets of my last post.


This is completely unrelated, but I believe 1 turn kill decks (Read: "It's my first turn? I WIN LOLZ") are the sole reason why I can't stand "competitive" players. Not to mention they throw "THIS IS BANNED" in my face. Fuck you Konami and you competitive pricks. It's in my deck, deal the fuck with it.

More so, how the hell did JINZO get ANOTHER slot? He was a 1 slot monster when I played. So now they think it's okay to run TWO per deck? What the balls was Konami thinking? In between making Metal Gears and horrible dance games, you'd think they'd just... Not piss off their only trading card fan base.

Heh... Lava Golem... HAHAHAHAHA

EDIT: Re-writing this to be clearer.

First of all, I'd like to specify as to what constitutes "rotation" in a collectible card game. Basically, as new sets come in, old sets are pushed out. This helps keep players on their toes, forcing them to consider new strategies and think differently with each "block." Aside from that, it also helps to keep various rules and effects from interfering with each other and becoming game breaking. This is good because there are fewer cards to keep track of, and there are no global "staples," i.e., cards which are common in every deck, regardless of theme or strategy. Sadly, this also means that the bulk of your collection may be sitting in a trunk until they get reprinted in a core set.
YuGiOh! does not rotate out sets. Despite that the game is about fourteen years old, you can still use cards from the very first set, so long as they aren't on the ban list; a ban list being a collection of cards which are not allowed in tournament play. There are specific cards which are forbidden entirely, and others which are "limited" or "semi-limited" (restricted to one or two per deck, respectively), but there is no single set which is entirely banned from tournament play because newer sets have come out. This is good because players can use a much wider variety of cards, and for the most part, they never lose value for being out-dated. Unfortunately, this also means that "staples" are developed, which is generally bad for any card game. Cards like Heavy Storm, Mirror Force, Trap Dustshoot, and Brain Control tend to find themselves in just about every deck you could think of, regardless of the deck's core purpose.

In short, no. YuGiOh! does not have a rotation of any sort. Moving on.

Most people would not spend hard cash on a $40 dollar card. The value is not based on the production cost of the card, but of its rarity and its usefulness. Mirror Force is a very widely used staple that is also somewhat difficult to get your hands on, because they are not common like Heavy Storm and are useful in any deck. Most people will instead trade off cards which equal up to about $40 dollars in value for a Mirror Force, rather than simply pull out a couple twenties. There have been many cases amongst people I know in which they take your advice, and spend a metric fuckton of cash on boosters, getting mostly garbage, and ending up spending about three times what it would've cost to simply buy the individual card they were looking for outright. In many cases, it's more efficient to look for the cheapest price on the cards you're looking for, rather than waste money on booster packs. I myself prefer to run very cheap decks, and as such, they're full of commons which I can usually get for $0.33 cents a pop or less.

There are many ways of pulling of an OTK (one-turn kill), but there are just as many ways to counter them. Most any OTK deck is going to revolve around battle damage. As such, a simple Threatening Roar could undo all their work and save you for a turn in which you drop a Lightning Vortex and completely tear them up. Mirror Force is also an effective method of stopping OTK decks, as well as the popular Cyber Valley and Battle Fader. There are plenty of other ways in which you could stop such decks- too many to list, in fact. If you're having issues dealing with an OTK deck, then you probably just need to edit your play style or the cards in your deck to accommodate for that. There's a reason we're allowed a fifteen-card side deck.

Jinzo, in fact, has three slots. It is completely un-restricted. Most people with half a brain only run two anyway, though, because three will clog up your hand. Jinzo is not nearly as broken as it used to be. Nowadays, it allows many Machine decks to scrape by with a little trap prevention. Keep in mind, there are plenty of cards like System Down which deal with Machines just fine. If anything, use Machina Gadget players are at a severe disadvantage. Throw in BTM, D.D. Crow, Crevice into the Different Dimension, Banisher of Radiance, Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer, Dimensional Prison, and other such cards, and we're pretty fucked. That's not even counting the almighty Thunder King Rai-Oh, who is pretty much the perfect anti-Gadget card, along with System Down.

What's so funny about Lava Golem? You get to pitch 2/5's of the enemy's front row to give them a beat stick they won't be able to do anything with if you play the card well in your deck. If they know that you have Lava Golems in your deck, they'll also be hesitant to play more than one creature at a time, which can easily lead to an OTK on your part.

About trading: People trade based on what they need and what they're willing to give. I traded away a Jinzo, Swords of R. Light and a spare Limited Blue Eyes for it. I traded cards I didn't give a damn about, which probably added up to "$20" total. Score for me I guess. This was when the set was 'behind' the one with Relinquished and all of the ritual gimmicks... A card, no matter how "rare" or sought out for is never worth anything more than $2.

People who can waste their money on cards, will shell out the retarded costs for 'em. I've seen it first hand. Ironic enough, I pulled a Vampire Lord from a booster minutes after my friend spent $30 on his at a local shop. Boy, I'm sure glad I "wasted" $5 on a booster pack then. The joke's on me =p. I know there's the whole "buy the common/uncommon(s) you need" thing. That's been around since Magic where you can buy lands for 5 cents a pop.

As for my hate for Jinzo, it's not that he was broken (least not to me) but "he" made a few of my friends go one of two routes: quit or get one for themselves. So he either pissed people off to the point of rage-quit or he made people sell out. And I know. Use whatever works. But Jinzo's only useful with the correct backing.

I've never had "issues" with 1 hit kill decks. In fact, there's almost no way someone's going to stop my 1900 first turn and a potential 5600+ the next. What gets me is that it just sucks the fun out of the game (see: Jinzo and what it did to my friend's play style for example). I have no problem winning when I have to. But sometimes it's just as fun to not pull the trigger. To let people get back up to see if they can come up with new ways to stop your set up... And vice versa. It's through this way, that I learned Different D. Dragon is pretty nice during the mid-game. ( I forget his name entirely, or what combo set up allowed him to be damn near invincible)

Understand this. I'm by no means knocking how you play Shine. I know you're pointing out how things have changed since I vanished to 'better' things.
But I ran circles around everyone I played against. Even the ones who beat me, BARELY beat me. I'm not trying to sound like an egotistical dick. I'm just saying. There are things I completely suck at and things I just sweep house at. This is a sweeper for me.

Let me tell you a story about lava golem. Back when I could find my side deck, I ran Mega Morph. I had a friend who loved LG. Probably still does.
Here's what his summoning got him:
Axe of D for 1000
Mega Morph for 3000+
Ring of Destruction for the game.

With 3 cards, I had cleared the game because he thought he was cleaver with his "lol I sac ur monsters for a 3000". I'm not saying LG is bad. I'm just saying that there are monsters who outclass him by a mile.

Akubarix wrote:About trading: People trade based on what they need and what they're willing to give. I traded away a Jinzo, Swords of R. Light and a spare Limited Blue Eyes for it. I traded cards I didn't give a damn about, which probably added up to "$20" total. Score for me I guess. This was when the set was 'behind' the one with Relinquished and all of the ritual gimmicks... A card, no matter how "rare" or sought out for is never worth anything more than $2.

People who can waste their money on cards, will shell out the retarded costs for 'em. I've seen it first hand. Ironic enough, I pulled a Vampire Lord from a booster minutes after my friend spent $30 on his at a local shop. Boy, I'm sure glad I "wasted" $5 on a booster pack then. The joke's on me =p. I know there's the whole "buy the common/uncommon(s) you need" thing. That's been around since Magic where you can buy lands for 5 cents a pop.

As for my hate for Jinzo, it's not that he was broken (least not to me) but "he" made a few of my friends go one of two routes: quit or get one for themselves. So he either pissed people off to the point of rage-quit or he made people sell out. And I know. Use whatever works. But Jinzo's only useful with the correct backing.

I've never had "issues" with 1 hit kill decks. In fact, there's almost no way someone's going to stop my 1900 first turn and a potential 5600+ the next. What gets me is that it just sucks the fun out of the game (see: Jinzo and what it did to my friend's play style for example). I have no problem winning when I have to. But sometimes it's just as fun to not pull the trigger. To let people get back up to see if they can come up with new ways to stop your set up... And vice versa. It's through this way, that I learned Different D. Dragon is pretty nice during the mid-game. ( I forget his name entirely, or what combo set up allowed him to be damn near invincible)

Understand this. I'm by no means knocking how you play Shine. I know you're pointing out how things have changed since I vanished to 'better' things.
But I ran circles around everyone I played against. Even the ones who beat me, BARELY beat me. I'm not trying to sound like an egotistical dick. I'm just saying. There are things I completely suck at and things I just sweep house at. This is a sweeper for me.

Let me tell you a story about lava golem. Back when I could find my side deck, I ran Mega Morph. I had a friend who loved LG. Probably still does.
Here's what his summoning got him:
Axe of D for 1000
Mega Morph for 3000+
Ring of Destruction for the game.

With 3 cards, I had cleared the game because he thought he was cleaver with his "lol I sac ur monsters for a 3000". I'm not saying LG is bad. I'm just saying that there are monsters who outclass him by a mile.

On the subject of trading, it varies from person to person. Personally, I do not mind trading off a super rare card in exchange for a common version of the same card, along with four or five extra cards that add up to the value of the card they want from me. There's no reason you shouldn't get your money's worth in a trade, and a lot of people are going to be perfectly willing- if not insistent- that you get just as much value out of the trade as they do. That's just how the YuGiOh community is.

Because of how expensive many YuGiOh cards are, you don't look at them as "wasting money." In YuGiOh, you look at your purchases as investments. Even if you don't particularly need the card, there's more often than not someone who does, and you can trade that card to them for many a fun pile. If you spend a lot of money on a card, it's usually because it's important to a particular deck or something, in which case, SOMEONE will want it if you decide you don't want to make the deck after all or something.

I don't see why Jinzo would make ANYONE quit the game entirely. I could understand that some Burn decks (heavy use of Ceasefire, Just Desserts, etc) would scoop a turn or two after Jinzo's out, but that's about it. As for getting one- not everyone NEEDS a Jinzo. It's really only useful in a deck that already runs Machines as its main monster type, and Jinzo's actually relatively easy to kill. Smashing Ground is up to three slots, and Cyber Dragon lets you fuse the opponent's Jinzo for a Chimeratech Fortress Dragon. There are plenty of ways to get around it.

Lava Golem isn't really outclassed by anything, considering it's the ONLY card in its class. No other monster can destroy two of the opponent's monsters and special summon itself to their side of the field. As such, there are a few nifty things you can do with it. Honest works well with Lava Golem, since you can swing into it with, say, Lord British Space Fighter, destroy Lava Golem after an Honest, and then swing again directly for 4200 Atk since you destroyed a monster by battle. You can also use a Neo-Spacian Grand Mole to bounce the Lava Golem back to your hand, as well as the Mole, and re-use both effects later.