Another deck-building strategy is to set your skill and your spell/trap cards first, then set your monsters. Set your monsters based on your skill – for example, Peak Performance will auto-boost your Winged Beast, Dragon and Thunder cards by dropping a Mountain field spell. And if you have the Fusion Weapon, which boosts a fusion monster by 1500 per stat, then use the filter to find and add Fusion Monsters to your deck.
If a rival player drops a card in the defensive position, drop a card in the defensive position as well to create an instant stalemate, epsecially if you have a strong defense card to drop as a form of trickery. This can also be used to drag a battle out in order to make time to drop a tribute summon card and put yourself in a dominant position. Combine this with a card such as Mask of Dispel (damages life points of a spell card user for as long as it remains on the field) to whittle away at the opponent’s life points.
However, don’t go TOO crazy with the trap and spell cards or you will end up not having enough monsters in your deck half the time when you battle. It’s good to have at least half of your deck comprised of monsters, and the other half made up of spell cards and trap cards. More than that in either direction will create an imbalance.
To unlock new characters, you have to activate them inside of the gate, and then beat them in a duel. To activate them, first they have to be available, which means you have to be at the right mission stage in order to activate them. After that, they have to be activated using the gate keys. Each color key activates a specific duelist, so while the gate keys don’t mean too much now, they mean a lot as you go further and gain levels.
Duel orbs are used for making standard duelists appear in the world areas, so if you don’t have any to battle, use your duel orbs to make more of them appear. Each standard duel uses one of your duel beacons (the five “energy” points). Once you run out of duel beacons, then go to the PvP area because those battles are free, or spend time organizing your deck.