YCS Columbus Recap

Boy, was I ever wrong in my predictions, lol. Ah well, a lot of other people predicted similarly so we're all equally wrong. Like I said, it's very hard to predict these kinds of things.

Once again Billy Brake wins with Plants, congrats to him. There were roughly 1100 players, which was more than I had expected. I'm glad it was a 4-digit attendance this time.
The top 32 ended up being:
20 Plant
3 Agent
2 Gallis (guessing Monster Mash?)
1 Karakuri
1 TG
1 Gemini
1 Gadget
1 Chaos
1 GB
1 TG Agent

Things I found surprising were the much lower number of Agent tops, Gallis/Monster Mash topping, and Jeff Jones' Karakuri. Seems like he's always willing to go with unconventional picks and it's great that he does well with them. I'm curious to see what his list, and the Monster Mashes, look like!

Like Mike Bonacini said in the past, Plants have essentially become a "good stuff" deck where you can basically take the best cards of the format, smush them together, and that's pretty much it. It's very similar to the old-school chaos decks where you took the best lights and darks, the most broken spells and traps and you were good to go. Now it's Tengu, Plant engine, some techs, and BLS. The nice thing with Plants is that they're very flexible in regards to their siding potential. Playing with Agents, I've found myself having a harder time siding because there are just so many cards that just have to be in there. Plants have the room to incorporate side cards into the main and not be affected in their flow. They're also a little harder to side against, compared to a theme deck like Agents, DW, Machine, etc.

As for Darkworld's underwhelming performance, I think it boils down to these issues (not necessarily in order of most critical to least):
1. Players had less time to test with it in real life (a million game 1's on DN can only go so far).
2. I'm guessing most players either had plenty of hate for it in their side, or altered their main to accommodate for it. Like I said, with all the hype surrounding it, players were gonna be prepared for this deck probably more than any other. This being said, most of the pros probably figured this wouldn't be the best deck to go in with.
3. Its dependency on having a discard outlet/consistency. If it can't get the cards it needs to get going, it's not gonna do anything. It basically always needs to have some 2-card combo to do stuff. Compare this with a deck like Agents or Plants that have consistent, good, stand-alone plays.

Is this to say that DW is a bad deck? I wouldn't go as far to say that, when it gets rolling it can do some pretty devastating things and create a lot of advantage. A part of me feels that the best list simply hasn't been found yet, I think it needs to incorporate some more in-general/tech cards so its not so dependent on its own strategy of discard+do some stuff. Until that happens though, I can't be bothered picking up Fabled Ravens especially since I'm gonna be ordering our PHSW cases really soon. Earlier I said I was gonna pick up 2, but they're $50 a pop and just didn't want to gamble it. Hopefully this YCS will cause a decrease in their value. I'd probably be willing to pick them up at $30 each. It kinda sucks that none top 32'd though since we won't have a list to concretely base anything off of. Did the best-finishing DW deck run 0, 1, 2 Ravens? I will stick with what I said in my Market Analysis on Glow-Up. With this YCS, I could see anywhere from a $5-8 value increase, but just remember that 1-year release mark of STBL is coming up. Formula Synchron gets a reprint in Advent Calendar, I could see Bulb getting reprinted sooner rather than later.

I will probably try out Plants next weekend, even though I've been doing just fine with Agents and I really do like the deck. I'm guessing we will be getting decklists over Youtube over the next few days, I will post them on the blog as I find them. Once again, congrats to Billy Brake on his back-to-back YCS win!