When I’m not playing bridge online, I branch some of my interests out into spending some time on other games. Board, card and tabletop games, mind you; usually I don’t practice anything that involves running, physical exertion or being hit in the face by anything from a hockey puck through to a baseball.

Among others, there’s chess, backgammon, reversi, Monopoly, Clue. Sometimes, the realm of TCGs that includes games of Necronomicon (the TCG, not the unfortunate handbook used for summoning creatures from the Lovecraft-mythos into our realm) and Yu-Gi-Oh!’s Duel Monsters.

Now, I’m a little great and a little terrible at most of those I mentioned. I”m far away from a champion player. I could say that I’m not quite as good as the protagonist or antagonist of the story; instead, I’m as good as the sidekick. (Much like sidekick characters in TCG-series’, I’m not undefeated or unrivaled, but occasionally, there’s a small victory.) 

I experimented with my performance at a TCG game this week – and it turned out to be a little bit of an underdog story.

First, I chose the most basic deck configuration possible. Let’s toss all the high-cards out the window and opt for something different. Main character Yu-Gi inherits his grandfather’s deck – and while it has its uses, it’s known for being a basic starter deck that almost every single player on earth immediately modifies and bulks up to their liking.

I left the deck as-is. Basic and unchanged. No alterations, no additions, no removals. While a lot of a TCG players’ strength lies in the cards they choose or deck they have, I know (from bridge) that a lot of your strength also lies in what you’re going to do with the cards you were given. So, I thought I’d play a game where I could see how far this could be pushed.

Think creatively. When you’re playing with a deck that has stronger, higher-attack monsters and all the best spells, you can just brute force your way straight through the game. (Not always, but sometimes. Let’s say that a superior deck can give a slight edge.) When your deck is out-of-the-box, it’s going to take some more creative thinking – better combinations at the right time – if you want to have any effect.

Using UI. Okay, so the monsters that occupied my deck weren’t powerful by any means, with the highest attack-points in my starting hand staying around 1, 300. (Well, great.) What helped, was placing these cards face-down; with the opponent having no idea what these cards were, they could be anything. Here, I used unseen information (that’s UI to bridge players and AI boffins) as a secret power that went beyond the deck construction.

Applying the best of the cards. So, looking at the deck, I certainly didn’t have any monsters that seemed to outrank the opposing hand. (Whoops.) But what I had was special abilities to some of the cards. (For example, when the monster is destroyed, the opponent loses more life points than what they’re attacking. This helped.) A mixture of special abilities like these turns out to have won the game.

Now, the victory dance. Okay, fine, I’ll admit that I felt rather accomplished at having achieved a victory. (Although, I do mean the term victory “dance” metaphorically; I don’t, and really don’t, dance.) This was an exercise in strategy-versus-brute-force – could you really base a game on “the heart of the cards”instead of their strength? At least this time, the answer appeared to be yes.