I have only played Multiplayer and as I go through making my first deck for Joust I am trying to master the difference between the two in terms of making of viable deck.

as you can tell this is a very tough question to answer in generalities.

A couple of pointers that I could think of are:

joust decks usually need more:

redundency, resources, and draw.

joust decks usually can't be as combo heavy as melee decks.

The largest consideration is that you will just have one opponent, and as a result, you will probably both defend more challenges and initiate more challenges against an opponent with strong defenses. This makes Stealth, Deadly and other challenge-based control elements much more important. You can focus all of your challenge efforts on one person, but that one person is focusing all of their challenge efforts on you!

As a result, single-character control effects (kneel one character, kill one character, etc.) becomes much more significant. Melee requires more concentration on global effects, Joust requires more concentration on "an opponent" effects.

ktom said:

Yeah, this is pretty much the main difference. Because single-character effects become more effective, control is also much easier to build in joust. So all of Lanni's targeted kneel effects work very well to control characters, and targeted kill (like Venomous Blade, etc.) and location discard are much stronger.