(1) starting with "simple yugioh". basically what you have with starter decks etc. here, the primary interactions are attacking and defending, and life points are your main currency. there are roughly 2 ways to play this: (a) you can play aggressive, put monsters in attack position despite the risk and try to beat the opponent before they can beat you. or (b) you can play more cautiously, playing primarily defenses and waiting until you have the resources to "safely" make an attack without risking life point loss. in a game like this i naturally gravitate toward (b), and apparently i do it quite well, sometimes ending games with most of my life points remaining, even against players that are moderately more experienced than me.

(2) moving outward, to basically any format past yugi-kaiba, we now have 2 axes to play on. one is life points, and the other is card advantage. aggro decks that i'm familiar with are focusing on the life point axis primarily, but are playing strategy (a) above in order to kill the opponent as quickly as possible. again, if i play against these aggro decks by using strategy (b) above, i tend to do very well. but i don't have a good grasp on the card advantage axis. presumably i'd want to play some analog to strategy (b) but i don't really know what that would look like on this axis.

(3) when it comes to strategy (b) to defend life points, there are three main ways to do this. one is to use strong defenders that will either have high stats (so they're less likely to get knocked off the board) or destructive flip effects (so that if they do get knocked off the board, they take the attacker with them). two is to use battle/summon traps (e.g. saku, trap hole) to "back up" weaker attack position monsters, protecting them (and thus your life points) against attacks. three is high attack monsters that have such high attack stats that they're unlikely to get beaten by anything else and are thus "safe" to play in attack position by default. there are probably other ways to do this in various formats depending on card pool - i know in goat format in particular you can use tsukuyomi to flip your monster back into defense position after attacking, for example - but those three ways i mentioned are the "main" ones i know of.

(4) the goat format decks i'm familiar with - including "control" decks like goat control and chaos turbo - don't seem to be equipped to play strategy (b) for protecting life points. they're somewhat lacking in traps, pretty lacking in strong defenders, and VERY lacking in high attack tribute monsters. my understanding is that this is because these decks are sacrificing life point protection for card advantage and don't particularly care about defending life points to begin with since life points aren't as important as card advantage. i do hear that control decks in goat format have to side deck against aggro decks (e.g. warriors), which seems to support my understanding here.

(5) not being able to play strategy (b) for defending life points puts me in a really awkward position, because that's my primary strength and playstyle in this game, to the point of almost being an identity for me. again, the best i can think to do is find some equivalent of (b) for card advantage. but i don't know what that would look like because i don't understand card advantage in general.

(6) this leads to the biggest problem: card advantage is a really awkward, unnatural "language" for me. i learned this game via starter decks and the anime back in the day, and (as in point 5 above) it seems like the card advantage aspect is actively clashing with my deeply ingrained insticts on how to play this game from 20 years ago. additionally - and more seriously - keeping track of card advantage seems to be hitting hard cognitive limits for what i'm able to process and think about in a short period of time. i'm not sure what to do about this and i don't seem to be improving at it despite playing on duelingbook on a regular basis.

(7) i'm not sure to what extent playing unranked on duelingbook is causing me to be constantly playing against far more experienced players who have years of experience over me. the people at the card shop i played against were more experienced than me, but were not super high level players by any means. so it's possible i'm better at the card advantage aspect than i think i am. i'd need to play against similarly-leveled players to be sure.

(8) i think what i was trying to accomplish the past week or so is that i was thinking that maybe the heavy focus on card advantage was a specific quirk of goat format, possibly because of the kinds of cards that were legal (pot of greed etc) in 2005. apparently card advantage is a big deal for most formats up until relatively recently, so no luck there. i thought edison in particular might have a cleaner "blend" of life point vs card advantage battles due to vayu turbo in particular being heavily equipped to defend life points, but it sounds like that's an incidental feature of the deck and doesn't reflect how it's actually played in practice. and it sounds like life points continue to not be very important (maybe even less important?) even into the more recent formats. so finding an alternative to goat format seems to be a dead-end. which is fine, i do have specific attachment to the 2005 card pool in particular. but it definitely makes my journey more difficult for sure.