For some of you, your favorite deck might be Royals, Nova Grappler or another table 200 deck and you might be dissatisfied with the lack of competitive representation your deck gets. You might think the deck is super good, you think the only reason people aren’t playing your deck at bigger tournaments is because they are building it or playing it wrong. You add in all these techs you think are super good you practice at home, and go to a tournament with it, and you get swept. You get frustrated and start blaming your loses on irrelevant scenarios. Truth of the matter is, no one is underestimating your deck, you are just overestimating your deck.

This has recently hit one of my close friends, who I’ve known since I started playing Vanguard six years ago. He was unhappy at the current state of Royals in the standard meta. He’s always loved the clan, and when his favorite card Exculpate the Blaster came out, he was thrilled with card and ready to play with it. However, when the deck failed to perform against the better decks of the format, he felt frustrated, blamed all the other decks for being too over powered and wanted to quit the game. Royals ever since the start of the reboot have never gone past B-tier in the standard format and this round of support did little to change that. If you find yourself in that mentality, the best advice anyone can give you is to simply step away from your comfort zone and try other decks. It’s a shame you can’t play your favorite deck but if losing is bad enough to completely ruin the game for you this a good way too go. You might even find that the new deck you play could be your next favorite.

Now, why is my favorite deck not competitive or have any top placings? I’ll keep this one brief since Youtuber, dzeeff, goes about it good detail in his video, “Why Nobody Plays Your Favorite Yu-Gi-Oh! deck,” (he refers to Yu-Gi-Oh! but it can apply to any card game) . In short, when someone who goes to large-scale competitive events where they have invested money in either an entry-fee, gas to drive to the location or hotel reservation they want to have the best chance to win to make their expenses worth it. This usually means using a top-tier deck over a deck in the lower tiers because that increases the odds of them topping at the event. Myself personally will always choose to use one of the top 3 decks at the time whenever I attend one of these events even if it is not my favorite deck to play. For example, at the Texas BCS 2018, I chose to use OTT over my current favorite deck at the time which was Nova Grapplers because I knew I had a higher chance of winning. While I only came in top 20 (just bit shy of the top 8 cut-off), I knew if I had use Novas I most likely would not have made it past the first few rounds.

I don’t mean this to be coming off as me just saying your favorite deck is bad. If you would simply like to play the game at a local or casual level and winning isn’t a priority for you, play whatever deck you want, but if you want to take your game up a notch and compete, don’t be surprised when your low tier deck fails to perform.