by One of the most important parts of modern Yu-Gi-Oh is non-engine. Non-engine slows the opponent down when you go second, giving you a chance to play the game, or it can also help protect your end board by providing you with more interaction after you’ve already used everything. It can also completely get rid of your opponent’s board, putting you into a winning position in a few card activations. There are 2 types of non-engine: hand traps, and board breakers.
OVERVIEW
Hand traps are cards that interact with your opponent on their turn if you go second. Some notable examples are, Mulcharmy Fuwalos, Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring, Droll & Lock Bird, Dominus Impulse, and Psy-Framegear Gamma. The main goal of these cards is to slow your opponent down enough, so that you can play on turn 2. Board breakers are cards that, as the name suggests, break the board. They do this through wiping the board, or negating monster effects. Some notable examples are, Forbidden Droplet, Dark Ruler No More, Lightning Storm, Super Polymerization, and Book of Eclipse.
Even though both of these types of non-engine serve the purpose of giving you a chance to go second, you rarely want to split your non-engine count between the two types. You should always play either board breakers or hand traps. This is because most meta decks have between 15 to 18 slots for non-engine, which means if you split your non-engine count you will lose because the quality of your non-engine is worse. Most decks favor playing hand traps over breakers right now because the meta decks are hurt more by hand traps than they are by board breakers.
Options
Here is my ranking of non-engine in this format:
Choosing What To Play
Now, how do you know when you want to play board breakers or hand traps in your deck? You have to look at how much non-engine you can play. Assuming you’re playing a 40 card deck: if you can play 15-18 non-engine, you should play hand traps, if you can only play less, you should play Mulcharmy Fuwalos and fill the rest with board breakers. There is actually a very good reason behind this rule, math. Math is very important to deckbuilding, and this is an example of that.
If you play 15-18 handtraps, you have a 63%-76% chance to see 2 handtraps which is usually the bare minimum to slow a deck down enough to give you a chance if you go second. Meanwhile if you can play 14 handtraps at most, you only have a 58% chance to see 2 handtraps which means that in slightly less than half your games you won’t see enough non-engine for it to matter. However, this is assuming the non-engine in question are handtraps.
Low non-engine count decks such as Memento and Lunalight give breakers a chance to shine. These decks play into the strengths of board breakers. Most of the time, you only need 1 board breaker and 5 pieces of a strong engine to play through a board. Both Memento and Lunalight have very strong engines, and can play through boards pretty well. However, they don’t have a lot of room for handtraps. This makes them the perfect decks to play board breakers in.
General Rules
- Play only 3 copies of a non-engine piece
- Ignore rule 1 if the card is limited or you can search it
- NEVER play non-engine at 2
- Play relevant non-engine
- ALWAYS play Mulcharmy Fuwalos if you have room
