Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Traditional?! + Upcoming Format

Yesterday I went to go hang out at T&M's with Danny, I was hoping Shiggs would be there since I wanted to play him at Magic but he never showed. I guess he's going to let Danny hold on to his deck so that we can play since I think Danny wants to get into it too. Brandon looks through my binder and pulls out a bunch of stuff that he wants, primarily for his "Mayhem" format. I guess he's going to keep Trish at 1 and Tengu at 3 but keep Bulb and Spore banned. I don't see much of anything I want from him, so we decide that he'll start a tab with me and pay me over time. I'm pretty patient when it comes to payments. Danny and I also work out a partial trade for the 2 Rescue Rabbits he wants from me. I've had a case of the hiccups for literally the past 3 and a half hours at this point so I decide to get something to drink from the store. Didn't help any but they finally went away later that evening. We grab our stuff and move to one of the back rooms, which we have dubbed to be "The O Lounge" lol, it's kinda awesome really. Brandon grabs his duffel bag full of binders and everything else and goes back with us. Danny and I playtest a little, his DW vs my (still) proxied Inzektors. Skill Drain is a bitch and I think it can make quite an impact on the coming format.

Trevor and Corey come a little later and Danny goes out in the middle of our game to trade with some random I think. I go out and ask about Trevor judging the box tournament since he has experience from hosting/judging for Northtown's. We bring him to the O Lounge and talk with him, unfortunately we come to the general consensus that realistically no one from any particular team can judge the event due to a potential conflict of interest. If he judged and someone felt that they got a bad ruling, they could potentially be like "oh you're just trying to help your team" and it goes the same way if I judged it or anyone from Team O did. Danny is working on bringing this guy from Yakima, Joe Lancaster, to judge it for us; apparently he judges a lot of the big events around here and is also going to judge at YCS Long Beach. He should be perfect! lol.

Anyways there is actually a pretty good turnout for Brandon's tourney, at 16 people. It's crazy to think he gets as many people for his "pseudo-Traditional" format as the other tourneys do for Advanced. Since he doesn't have his list online anywhere, I actually went in to T&M one day and sat there for about 10 minutes writing down his entire list. Basically it's not as "nilly willy" as regular Traditional, but isn't as restrictive as Advanced. The majority of the players there are those that don't quite measure up in the skill department, at least enough that is necessary to do well in the Advanced tourneys around here. I don't think these people actually "play Traditional" though, they just run their Advanced deck but include some of the broke cards that have been banned or limited forever. I don't know much about Traditional but I'm sure that ain't the way to do it lol. I actually did a little research into what's considered good in that format, and I found a deck I liked so I ordered the stuff for it from Troll. Oh, what have I gotten myself into, lol.

As for the coming format, it's basically this format minus Plants and Agents. Locally, I imagine it to be the assortment of random stuff that we've always had. I'm pretty sure the more competitive players will be playing the big 3 of Wind-Up, Dino Rabbit, and Inzektor. I imagine Inzektor to be the most popular option simply because it doesn't necessarily run Tour Guide by default. Once the SE hits, there'll be more Hornets in the market and will thus be cheaper, causing more players to play it. I also think any deck that can run 3 Skill Drain in the main will be a good option as well. Whether that be in some new altered form of TG, Dark World, or something else, who knows. A lot of people online are dismissing the E-Tele engine as making an impact, which is what I was slightly afraid of when I first saw the list and saw people hyping it up. Maxx C is a card after all, which is primarily why stuff like Instant Fusion wasn't ran. Maxx C is still a very scarce card in my area though, and with its increased price, it's not gonna become any more available. Tele engine may be good in my area, but probably not if everyone had 3 Maxx C. God, that's gonna be the perfect card for them to put in Gold Series, right? Basically they've made the game to the point where it's a mandatory 3-of, expensive on the secondary market, announce it as one of the first reveals causing everyone and their mother to pre-order boxes of it, and then short-print it? Profits!! I'm selling mine around June or so just because it's pretty much guaranteed that something like that's gonna happen. Since they've used up the Tour Guide and Fiendish Chain options for Battle Pack, they're gonna need something really good to help Gold Series. Or they'll just make it shitty like they did with Gold 4 and just make really good tins again.

No comments:

Post a Comment