Build a deck in 5 easy steps!

I originally posted this on Pojo, but I've gotten good feedback elsewhere and figured I'd share it here, too.

1) Decide on your theme/win condition.
Too many people pick an archetype or something and forget to focus on how their deck is supposed to WIN. With Machina Gadgets, it's Fortress Beatdown. With Flamvells (my personal fav) it's Rekindling OTK (usually). Decide on the major cards/combos that will give you victory.

2) Begin the deck with the cards necessary to pull off your win condition.
For example, if you're going a Dark Simorgh route, you will (obviously) need Simorgh in there, but you'll also want plenty of WIND and DARK attribute monsters as targets for summoning. Also include any spells and traps necessary for summoning conditions (i.e., rituals, fusions, etc.)

3) Add supporting techs.
These will include staples like Mirror Force, MST, Solemn, etc. You can be creative here, go nuts. Add anything that will help your deck, and don't be afraid of having too many cards. You'll take care of that step 4.

4) Narrow it down.
Once you've added your support, you'll want to get the deck as close to 40 cards as possible in order to maximize the odds you'll draw what you need. Another thing to keep in mind is the monster to s/t ratio. In general, you'll want around half of your deck (17-20) to be monsters. Exceptions to this are things like burn decks and Lightsworns. Burn decks (especially chain burn) tend to have a lower monster count with a huge backrow. Lightsworns go the other way, with all of their milling, they run a minimal s/t lineup to maximize their monster's effects and JD plays. An extreme example is Magical Merchant. Merchant decks tend to run 32-37 monjsters and only enought s/t to stop the Merchant mill. (This decktype is awesome for Skull Servant OTK decks.)

5) Test
I can't stress this step enough; you need to know what works and what doesn't. There are two main goals to testing.
A) If something keeps ending up dead in your hand, switch it for something better. This will also help familiarize yourself with your new deck and possible combos. You can combine this and step 4 to narrow down those choices that just aren't going to work.
B) Consistency is key. You need to make sure that you can not only pull off your combos, but you can do them often.

Hope this helps.

This may have been posted some time ago, but I like this article a lot! Great work on it.

Thank you.

I nearly forgot about this forum... I have a lot going on right now. XP

That is fine. Try to post here whenever plausible though. We enjoy the activity.