A Disquieting Event

Am I less of a man if my 9yo daughter outsmarts me at a collectable card game? Six out of seven times?

Maria de Guadalupe and I have been playing Yu-Gi-Oh! Nightmare Troubadour (for the Nintendo DS); troubadour means "poet," and I'm not sure what a nightmare poet is.

How Yu-Gi-Oh Plays
Yu-Gi-Oh, for the uninitiated, allows you to either summon monsters, use spells, or set traps. Alternatively, you can also summon monsters that require you unsummon, or tribute, existing monsters you've placed on the table, or fuse together powerful monsters into an even larger monstrosity of doom. Tie in the traps which vary from making your life difficult to altering the playing field, and spells, and you have an interesting game, despite the child-like Anime that the game is famous for.

Nintendo DS Variant
On our Nintendo DS's, we each have a copy of the game (stupidly, Wi-Fi play over the Internet is unsupported, which doesn't effect us) and found a savegame on the 'net that gave us virtually every card available in the game. This saved us from plodding through the single-player grind and allowed us to immediately get to the fun parts: pitting our decks and strategies against one another.

May the Smackage Commence
The very first game we played, we each used a "Generated" deck of cards, because the starter deck sounded - lame. Maria won. We tried again, and she won. Then I found a deck recipe on the Internet and tried using that, and she built her own deck, and she won. Then I found a tournament winning deck recipe on teh Interwebs, only I only found the first half of the deck, so I filled it out with my own monster selections, and she won, and then I found the second half of the same tournament winning deck (duh, scroll down to the next post), and used that, and I beat her quickly! I thought "Aha! I have it. Now she'll have to make a new deck." Then I played her again using the same deck, and she won. This morning, we played one more time, and she won.

Limping, and One Example Game
At this point, I plan on trolling the tournament winning deck recipes just to see what good cards are out there and putting together my own deck, because Maria is slaughtering me.

My spells really messed her up last night, and I got her down to 2,500 health (from 8,000) and my health was 11,000 because I had a healing fairy out (she kept killing the poor little things, and I kept drawing another and summoning it). Finally she brought out a big, bad dragon, and then another, in two turns, and slaughtered me. I died in 3 turns to 3,000 and 2,000 damage combined each round. My extra health made killing me a road-bump, for all it mattered.

How She Does It
I asked her how she came up with her deck, since there are over 1,000 available cards, and she said "I just sat down and read them. What do you think I was doing yesterday? (while I was at work)"

Well. Homeschool. But I forget she does have time to herself aside from that.