flamevall deck need help

Einstein-

This topic came up to me recently in the YGO forums and I vehemently defended the idea that you should never use more than 40 cards in a Deck, and I wanted to back up that idea here.

The thesis of my point of view is that reducing the number of cards you have heightens the chances that you'll draw a card you need. Let's start with a very basic example. If you're running a deck based around "Exodia, the Forbidden One", how many cards would you ideally have in your deck to maximize your winning chances? Six. You would have one of each piece of Exodia, plus one other random card in there so that you don't lose the game in the first turn. Now, let's say someone told you that you had to have 10 cards in your deck. What cards would you add, if you could use any card and there were no limitations? You'd probably use 5 "Pot of Greed". That's because you want to draw more cards and increase the likelihood of drawing the five pieces of Exodia. If you had to have a 20 card Exodia deck, you'd use 10 copies of "Pot of Greed" and probably two copies of each piece of Exodia. And here, you see it would be basically impossible to lose, but that's so much more complicated than just running one of each piece and just one other random card. There's no reason to add in extra cards if you could do what you wanted with less cards.

Now, of course, there are real limitations on what kinds of cards you can use and how many copies of them you can use, so if you had to make a 20 card Exodia deck in the current Advanced Format, you'd maybe use cards like "Sangan", "Emissary of the Afterlife", etc. Or maybe "Pot of Avarice" and some cards to bring monsters back from the Graveyard. But you wouldn't be happy about this, because a guaranteed first-turn win is probably always better, isn't it?

There's no reason this logic can't be extended to deckbuilding in general. Some decks are based around a specific card; some are not. For instance, a "Cyber-Stein" OTK is based around getting "Cyber-Stein" out and summoning something like "Cyber End Dragon". So naturally, the main goal of the deck is to Summon "Cyber-Stein". Now as before, you would want to play this with only seven cards so you could just end the game first or second turn. If you had to make a 40 card deck, your idea would be to include as many cards as possible that would either help you search/Summon "Cyber-Stein", or defend it or increase your chances of pulling off the OTK. And, of course, there certainly are plenty of good cards you could use to help the theme. But if you had 80 cards in your Deck, you'd start to run out of good cards and your chances of drawing "Cyber-Stein" would be decreased dramatically.

Other decks aren't based around a specific tactic, but have a general strategy (for instance, a Warrior Toolbox deck) that involves using cards that work together to pull off a slower win. Now, why should we use only 40 cards in these? There's a couple reasons. The first is similar to the last point I made above. I'll use the Warrior Toolbox example because I've played the deck before. There are certainly 40 good cards you can use in a Warrior Toolbox deck, because there's lots of good Warrior Effect Monsters, plus all the 'requisite' monsters like "Spirit Reaper" or other generally good cards one would use. But if you had to make a 60 card Warrior Deck, the number of good Monsters you could use would start to slim out. You could start to go into previously used Warrior cards like "Blade Knight", "Marauding Captain", etc., but you wouldn't be happy about it because those cards are inferior to the newer cards that have since been released, and pretty soon you would start using outright mediocre cards. So one reason to minimize the number of cards is simply to use the best of the cards you have available. The second reason is a corollary to this. In theory, the 40 cards that you are using in a deck are the 40 best cards you could find for that deck (if not, you need to rebuild). This means that if you have 40 cards and add a 41st card, that 41st card is not as good as the other 40 cards. Is that such a bad thing? I would argue that in fact, it is. If you're in a tight spot, you want to draw the absolute best you can rely on. If your opponent has 3 monsters on the field and you've got no cards at all and 1000 LP, and you draw that second "Enemy Controller" you added, you're going to be slightly annoyed. There's a huge difference between how a deck looks on paper, and how it actually plays; while it may be nice to have two of a certain card because it protects your monsters or something like that, it may not always work to your advantage.

That last thing leads me on to something else. A lot of people, when defending 41 or 42 cards, will say something like "it's a lot more consistent" or "a lot more stable." I'm not particularly looking to offend anyone in this article, but that's simply stupid. There is no way that adding a card inferior to the 40 cards you're using could possibly make your Deck better. It is just logically impossible. If you're using that six card Exodia deck, does adding a "Sangan" to your Deck make it more consistent? No, you're going to decrease your chances of winning, even though "Sangan" is a really good card. Similarly, adding a card or two to a deck is actually decreasing the consistency, because assuming your Deck has the central idea of only a few different cards, like "Dark Armed Dragon", drawing the cards you actually need will be less likely because you added in other cards.

To go into the math a little bit, let's say you have a 40 card deck. If you have one "Cyber-Stein" in your Deck, the chances that you draw one in your first five cards is 12.5%, and the chances that you'll draw it in your first 10 turns is 37.5% (and of course, this is with normal drawing and no deck thinning). If you had 42 cards in your Deck, the chances of drawing "Cyber-Stein" in your opening hand is 12.1%, and the chances of drawing after the first 10 turns is 35.7%. This may not seem like a huge difference, but in a tournament where you play most likely more than 20 games of YGO, that can really add up.

To conclude, I'd just like to point out the logic of the situation. You wouldn't disagree that 6 cards is better for Exodia than 60, because the less cards you have, the greater your chances of drawing the cards you need. If you agree that's true, how can you possibly justify using 41 or 42 cards over 40?

tl;dr - 42 may be the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, but it's worse than 40 in YGO.