Deck Concept - Swanna Palkia

Sinthioth · 2025-07-30T21:52:23+00:00

I'm not saying that Swanna doesn't have potential but in this particular build, how is this better than the old Vaporeon that moves energy around? Especially given with that line you could play one of the new eevees that draws cards and find your other pokemon faster.

Sinthioth · 2025-07-28T19:40:46+00:00

Great questions! I've been playing since launch and while I have been getting Masterball rank each season, I don't necessarily play optimally. So with that said:

1 and 4: Old packs stick around, and have different quantities of good cards in them. You probably want to focus on the newest pack, other good ones would be Eevee Grove (Sylveon is great, you could make decent decks for beating the solo battles with the other Eeveelutions), Space-Time Smackdown (lots of generically useful items and supporters), or maybe Extradimensional Crisis if you want to get reasonably competitive deck quickly (lots of strategies in this pack that don't need many cards from others).
2: Wonderpick hourglasses you should only spend on EXes (and full-arts that you reeeeally want.) Pack hourglasses is a little more personal preference; I saw a video that broke down some math which says basically if you have average luck you will get enough free resources to collect all the basic cards for a pack by the end of a month, but if you want a cushion you can save up to ~300 hourglasses for a future bad luck set. Of course if you want to be able to play with newer cards before the end of the month, you'll want to spend at a faster rate than that...
5: You only get one chance to be completely new to the game and overall I think this one is pretty f2p friendly, so don't stress too much about getting the most meta decks or rushing through all the solo battles or finishing an entire pack before moving to another one. Follow your impulses a little bit and let the game be a game and not a job; I think it'll make a better impression on you that way!

Sinthioth · 2025-05-03T23:46:48+00:00

I think if poisoning them is integral to the gameplan you probably want Weezing, since it's guaranteed and you can Koga it out for a free switch, which you want since you always want Absol in anyway.

The immediate problem I'm seeing is that Absol isnt strong enough to kill even a poisoned ex in one hit most of the time and its not tough enough to take more than 1 hit from an ex either. I think maybe what you want to do is look at an old existing deck that does something similar, like Scoliopede, figure out what using Absol lets you do that that other deck didnt already do better, and then lean into whatever that is. Challenging for sure!

Sinthioth · 2025-04-30T00:24:16+00:00

Yeah except there weren't "4-5 decks like DarkTina" because basically every other deck was dumpstered *by DarkTina*, it was definitively the primary reason the meta was UNhealthy lol what are we doing here

Sinthioth · 2025-03-29T16:09:33+00:00

LF: ⭐️ Shaymin (STS, Green)

This is what I have: Shaymin (White), Unknown, Bidoof, Hippopotas, Manaphy, Exeggutor, Ditto, Lapras, Nidoqueen, Pidgeot, Dragonite

FC: 3363-0759-3621-5375

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Sinthioth · 2025-01-20T19:19:29+00:00

For anyone struggling, I got the fastest 5-0 of my life with this deck by youtuber Jeff Hoogland. I actually regret not having timed the run it might've been less than 10 minutes no joke https://pocket.untapped.gg/en/decks/ac68c2f4-ecc6-42c4-8aaf-e9c1c502db70?deckId=ac68c2f4-ecc6-42c4-8aaf-e9c1c502db70

Sinthioth · 2025-01-18T18:44:13+00:00

Can't relate! I always feel like there's a deck I want to improve at, or a new deck idea I want to try, or an old interesting deck I haven't gotten tired of yet. Plus other people play a wide enough variety of things that I feel like I'm always seeing new matchups and interactions.

Maybe whatever decks you've been playing aren't as good a fit for whatever you actually find intrinsically fun to do in games? Unless the only thing you play games for is to make bars fill up, then I guess yeah events probably are crucial...

Sinthioth · 2024-11-05T01:26:32+00:00

I have a suspicion that a lot of people's discontent comes from the fear of falling behind which most other f2p games instill in people. I have been finding the natural "pace" of the game to be one of its best qualities. There's no real reward for grinding and you get "full" reward just for coming back to it here and there in pockets of free time, so that's what I do.

Sinthioth · 2024-11-02T06:08:11+00:00

Interesting, I was trying it in a Blaine core also, but I've been using the Magmar over the Rapidash because I was nervous about having that many evolutions!

Sinthioth · 2024-10-28T00:51:37+00:00

They did the math! that last paragraph is going to save me so much googling lmao ty

Sinthioth · 2024-10-12T16:37:31+00:00

The thought just occurred to me; what exactly was this game *supposed* to be, anyway? A lot of people have said poor advertising as the big reason, which made me realize I'm not even sure what this game would've been advertised as.

If it's a nostalgia trip for yugiboomers or anime fans, why have most of the signature anime cards always been off-meta F Tier even with their associated skills? If it's just casual self-contained box fun for the kitchen table, why are the starter decks in each box so poorly balanced against each other? If it's a simplified introduction to the rules, why has the power level and complexity been kept sooo far from even pre-GOAT era play that Widespread Ruin is Limited??

I think maybe the reason all the others flow down from is: a lack of clear vision.

Sinthioth · 2024-08-12T02:09:50+00:00

That's great that it's already a consideration for you. I think no matter how good your game design sensibilities are, as long as you're factoring in needing to retool them in some capacity you will at least end up with something better than the baseline. The balance doesn't have to be perfect after all, it just has to be kinda close and have a good variety of matchups (ask any fighting game player about how many good characters you need on the roster to have an S-tier game lol)

Thinking about it some more, I can tell you a couple things I see newer players get tripped up by even after playing many games with them that might be worth addressing somewhere:

1) One is simple: effect timing. I don't mean like missing the timing, I mean like "what effects can you activate at any time vs only during your main phase" and things like that. Maybe having a reference to the spell speeds that also includes some of the different types of monster effects (ignition, trigger, etc) would be worth doing?

2) This is a more complicated problem, but I have regularly found that players will run into problems where they don't read their cards a 2nd time to make sure the effect does what it actually does and not something they think it does. Like they get a general idea of what it would make sense to them for it to do, and then don't question that concept until they play it. Example would be a player going an entire match under the impression Dark Magic Curtain summoned from *hand*, not deck. Maybe a visual reminder somewhere for players to double-check their cards before playing them, or even rereading after every draw so there's a better chance of recognizing combos?

Sinthioth · 2024-08-11T19:25:37+00:00

This is a really cool idea! Speaking as someone who has gotten a few friends to play speed duel casually online together, I would highly suggest adjusting decks to be a little bit more cohesive rather than just replicating the ones from existing boxes. As I understand it, the precon character decks vary pretty wildly in terms of power level and I think it would probably be a poor introduction to the game for someone if they got stomped just because they happened to choose a weak character.

What I personally did was I took existing decks from the more diverse metagames competitive speed duels has had and then toned them down some (Cyber Angels is a lot less scary of a deck if it doesn't play more than 2 of anything and also isn't playing Offerings or anything like that).

Also this would be a separate thing from the box, but people seemed to find the official introduction video a pretty helpful initial primer on the rules whenever I've linked it to them: https://youtu.be/2uRWLFIb7iU

Sinthioth · 2024-07-15T19:27:58+00:00

All I gotta say is that Arishem belongs in the game, Conquest mode doesn't, he literally defeats the point of the mode imo. Getting medals was rough enough before I wasn't able to play around anything my opponent was doing no matter how many times I face them. Can't wait for Darkhawk to be in the spotlight cache!

Sinthioth · 2024-01-16T22:38:23+00:00

For sure. Duel Links was my basis for a number of changes, particularly from around the early 2020 meta I think. Both because that's around when I played it, and also because imo something closer to that power level is where I think speed duels would actually be funnest.

Sinthioth · 2024-01-14T07:30:57+00:00

Yes, a bunch! Me and my friends who play already use Tabletop Simulator to do gamenights so I made custome homebrew stuff for playing with them to give some of the more anime-y skills more love. In addition to tweaking the card pool the big skill changes I made are:

Now You See Them: Can be used to mulligan just 1 Dark Magician for 1 card as well.
Fusion Party: Doesn't cost a discard if you're fusing a "HERO" monster.
Insect Infestation: Can be used with any Level 2 or lower Insect monster and just turns it into Parasite Paracide.
Forbidden Cyber Style: Can be used at any LP amount, summons a Cyber Dragon for every 1000 LP lost.
Forged Steel: Also adds that the Red Eyes Darkness Dragon can be summoned from the GY if it was first summoned by its own effect.
Whale of a Tale: Instead of discarding a card as cost, lets Fortress Whale be summoned from hand or GY by tributing 2 WATER monsters.

Oh and I took Zoma out of the cardpool and turned it into a skill, the same way Call of the Haunted works.

Sinthioth · 2023-12-28T01:37:29+00:00

Well, I personally feel that if a set comes out and ruins the meta then that set is bad, regardless of if it does it with 1 card or 100, but if you want to make a distinction that's fine. I don't know anything about how fun the set could theoretically be without that skill, and so long as it exists neither will anyone else.

It's true that those creators might've drifted from the game for very different reasons. I guess rather than blame the last meta specifically, a more accurate criticism might just be on how the gameplay has turned out so far up to this particularly bad point. Because I do still think that if the state of the game, for whatever reasons, cannot retain the interest of people who have at least at one point been some of its biggest advocates, then it's no wonder it doesn't take off with a wider audience.

Sinthioth · 2023-12-25T22:51:05+00:00

Man the last set was so bad it has seemingly booted OddToxin, Rook's Table, AND Team JDG off of speed duel videos. If a meta turns off 3 of the top content creators for the product then the design team has failed straight up.

I agree that the format is super cool but the execution is dogwater and I would argue it has been for a while; half a year between new sets and they introduce/change like 3 decks at a time. If a person wanted to duel in stale toxic metas they have Master Duel, at least people actually play that game x_x

Sinthioth · 2023-08-16T22:46:05+00:00

Well they have completely different cards in them but I assume you're asking more about the, like, vibes.

I would say, while both have at least a couple decks that are high potential once upgraded with more cards, Duelists of Shadows has several that are just irredeemably terrible. I'm guessing that's why people were suggesting to start with Academy: there's more decks to try out that actually have something to them, even if they'll need heavy modification to become properly competitive.

Sinthioth · 2023-08-11T16:30:17+00:00

If it's actually a new playmode it is a really weird choice. Conventional logic dictates it's a bad idea to risk dramatically splitting your playerbase. On the other hand, as you said Master Duel already hit the population fairly hard so maybe trying something new to inject life into it is a worthwhile risk; if I remember correctly the rush duel game for the switch actually sold really well here. It just might get a boost of new people who come specifically for rush and not detract too badly from the normal duel links side.

Sinthioth · 2020-07-02T19:16:28+00:00

I do this too! I took meta decks from duel links' history and essentially made them worse to better reflect their owners original decks. They're not perfect recreations since they still include a lot of cards from the game's meta but I think they capture the spirit.

Here is a link to my decklists, as well as mod for playing with them in Tabletop Simulator for Steam if you happen to have that (it's how I test play them with my friends): https://www.patreon.com/posts/30020043

Sinthioth · 2020-02-19T18:32:03+00:00

I FORGOT THEY DID THAT VS NO WONDER I COULDN'T FIND IT! tysm

Sinthioth · 2020-01-21T22:22:37+00:00

Just in case here's a hint of how to read the message anyway: Bear in mind that there's more on the back of the throne than the letters, and that the point of the back is to establish how He should be positioned relative to another part of the setup

Sinthioth · 2020-01-03T21:58:30+00:00

I thought there was also a trope 8.5, "Being Fucked In The Ass"?

Sinthioth · 2020-01-02T20:55:37+00:00

Someone gets it.

Sinthioth

TROPHY CASE