About card advantage

For almost as long as I can remember, every professional Yu-Gi-Oh deck has revolved around a fundamental strategy known as card advantage. There are rare exceptions with certain niche decks, usually alternate win conditions (e.g. Exodia, Last Turn, etc.), but it's important for the mainstream aggro, control, themes, and just about everything else. Unless a substantial payment of life points is required, cards are rated in terms of what advantage they pose - whether that be a +1, or -1, for you or the opponent.

Quite simply, a +1 means the affected player has 1 more card than before, while a -1 means said player has 1 less card than before. To simplify things, a -1 for the opponent is often seen as a net gain of +1 for the turn player. A classic example of this is Snatch Steal; by playing this 1 card we immediately gain 1 monster, and the opponent loses 1 monster. So, this is a +1 player, -1 opponent, or net gain of +2, at least in theory. In practice, it was a +3 (-2 for opponent) because the person using Snatch Steal would take the larger monster and attack the smaller monster. This all came at no substantial cost (the 1000 LP gain rarely happened, and was insignificant when it did), and Snatch Steal was considered "broken". It was banned specifically because of this unbalanced card advantage, so the game would be more playable.

In contrast, cards with a significant cost or drawback for such effects were considered "balanced". A good example is Dark Bribe (stop 1 opponent's card, they draw 1 in return). The controversy about why people like or dislike this particular card has some deep roots that can take up another post on its own, so I'll skip over that topic for now, but needless to say Dark Bribe has never been banned and has never hurt the playability of the game. That's because despite the versatility it has a net gain/loss of 0 for both players; perfectly balanced. This card advantage fundamental affects complicated and unusual decks as well, such as Winged Kuriboh LV 10 (-4 for near-game-breaking effect), where a single well-placed Divine Wrath can leave the player completely defenseless.

There is another type of card advantage I would like to give special attention to, known as hand control. Hand advantage is any card advantage involving adding or removing cards from a player's hand, and hand control means exploiting this to significantly limit the opponent's options. Most players today are very familiar with the net gain aspect of hand advantage, mainly drawing/searching. You draw/search a card from your deck to your hand, your options increase, and you're significantly more likely to make a good play that turn, or at least build up to one in the near future. In contrast, excessive hand control means you have no options. Every single card matters, and if you discard 1 or 2 cards, it is going to cause significant harm.

The problem with hand control, in comparison to field advantage, is that cards on the field had to have been played at one point or another, but if discarded from the hand that meant it was never played. From the receiving end, you are at a -1 before you even had a chance to respond. Losing a powerful monster that was dominating the field and took a lot of effort and resources to play, by a broken card like Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning or Dark Armed Dragon, can be frustrating, but at least it got a chance to do something. Losing it from your hand before you had a chance to play it is just plain unfair.