The Cards Resource

[psychospacecow]

In the original Duel Monsters, you could deplete the opponent's Life Points in a number of ways:

• By destroying an opponent's monster in attack position. The difference between the two ATK values is subtracted from the opponent's Life Points.
  
• If you attack an opponent's monster in that is in face-down defence position and it has a higher DEF than your monster's ATK, your monster remains on the field, but the difference is subtracted from your Life Points.
  
• If your opponent has no monsters on the field then your monsters can attack their Life Points directly, which simply subtracts the monster's ATK value from it.
  
• Various Spell Cards, Trap Cards, and Effect Monsters have effects that can reduce Life Points.
  

Has this changed? If so then I might have to learn the game all over again, I really assumed that it would have remained the same, with only minor changes such as extra card types.

Could you explain why archetypes are essential? Is it something to do with Xyz Monsters? I think having "Resource" on every monsters seems a bit repetitive. And what do you mean by "searching out"?

No, it hasn't changed, it just requires that you focus your efforts more intensely. A deck with many outs isn't necessarily good at any of them.
What I mean by searching out, to search through one's deck and add a card to one's hand. Searcher is a generally used term.
Archetypes are needed to fit each monster under a common label, and it used so certain decks cannot exploit the effects of other archetypes. Imagine how broken all the burn decks or deck outs would be if they had the power of defense decks.

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The game has sped up a lot since GX, the days of making a deck based on what looks cool are gone.