Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Box Tourney Recap + Ban List Hopes

So Sunday was our monthly box tourney at Gamer's Haven, where attendance was much lower than anticipated. Even with it given a week extension and a lot of word-of-mouth, for what ever reason, not a lot of people showed up. At one point I was sitting next to Danny and he was just like "it's the team, Jo's crew, Paul and Roy, and that's basically it." Mike H and Seto were also there, but considering the number of people that do play the game around here, that's pretty bad. Like I said, I'm not sure on the exact reasons, but it has to be one of or some combination of: price of the entry, day of the week, lack of interest in Battle Pack, or fear of competition. Now when it comes to the entry fee, at $10, that's not too bad considering Uncle's charges $15 and they've had similar turnouts, if not better, when you consider that Jo's crew doesn't show up for those. Sunday has never been a problem for most people in the past, so not sure why it would now. I know some people have work on Sundays, that's just something that happens. I try to come up with an excuse by saying "4th of July", but it just seems too early for most people to be heading off for vacations and whatnot. Battle Pack, which was the prizing for the event, has become pretty saturated since a lot of people have bought/acquired a lot of it. Perhaps they didn't want to play in a tourney where that was the prizing since they've acquired so much of it. Hopefully our next box tourney will be for Return of the Duelist, which will be brand new and hopefully people get excited for the set. And last but not least, unfortunately, I still feel that a lot of people don't come because they are scared of doing poorly and investing $10 into it at the same time. I've already talked about the importance of playing in more-competitive tourneys and how to improve many times before, so I'm not going to beat the dead horse anymore about it.

As for the tourney, I decided to give Inzektors another run after not having played it for a month, and changed my list in an effort to deal with Chaos Dragons better (ie maining 2 Reaper and dropping Veiler to 1). I unfortunately wasn't at the comfort level I wanted to be at with Wind-Ups so I made up my mind about a week ago that I'd run Inzektors for it. Since the deck isn't really ran around here anymore, I was also hoping that people had less hate for it in the side and fewer Veilers were being maindecked.
What I thought would happen: I'd make a glorious comeback with Inzektors and tear it up like I used to with the deck.
What actually happened: The deck pretty much pooped on me in all different forms, and then I got derped on by the others I faced. I experienced: all monster hands (only had 18 main), never drawing a Centipede/Dragonfly, Sabersaurus + 5 backrow one of which being Macro with me not having removal, and Chaos Dragon derp in general. In the Macro scenario, when I tried to run over by equipping Mantis, I got Compulse'd. Vampire fuck up my evening.
I saw similar BS happen to other people all day, where skilled players lost out to outright bad players simply because of opening hands and draws. It made me really disgusted at what the format had degenerated into, and the thought of 2 more months of this crap is kinda depressing. I know summer formats are bad and all, but holy cow is it just me or does this one just seem exponentially worse? It's also that time of the format where spending a lot of money on any one deck is just a bad idea cuz you never know what will happen with the ban list. My vote has to go to selling the majority of my stuff off and sticking with a deck to ride the format out with, preferably one that is cheap and has the lowest chance of getting hit.

Before Wind-Ups won Nationals, I thought that it would be the deck that fit into this category. It was always good, but the spotlight had moved away from it and it doesn't top a whole lot in the OCG since they don't have a lot of the cards. Now it seems that theoretically any deck has justification for why it should be hit/what aspect of the deck should be hit. In most cases, rightfully so. For example a lot of people think Card Destruction should be banned because it gives Darkworld crazy advantage, even though DW isn't really all that played right now. Should Card Destruction be banned? Yea, I think so. The problem with our current list is that for the most part, it only dealt with the the early part of what we were going through in the previous format. They hit TG Agent and Plants, and everyone was scratching their head thinking "what about Rabbit, Wind-Up, and Inzektor?" Due to the desire to sell product though, it was clear that they didn't want to hit the decks that emerged from the latest couple of sets and they went virtually untouched. I'm hoping they do more than just nerf the hell out of Inzektors and will actually be able to solve some of the problems we've seen this format. I know a lot of people would bitch about it, but I kind of wish that we'd have a ban list every 3 months because the tendency always seems to be we have a good first half, then a shitty second half. This usually occurs with the release of a new set, new broken combos/decks are formed, and they don't get dealt with until 3 months later. This seems to be exactly what has happened with this format, I thought overall the first half was good, now it is just terrible. I remember previous formats having similar patterns.

8 comments:

  1. I think this format wasn't very good to begin with, though that was partly due to the existence of ignition effect priority at the time

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  2. Yea, you're right. That period of time between the ignition change and when Chaos Dragon became a deck is probably what I was thinking about. When Heroes were actually played.

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  3. honestly I think it would probably be better for the tournament if people knew that you and your team would be there but not playing in in it cuz I cant remember a time when its not like 2 or 3 of your guys winning most of the prizes even if you do split all the time. who wants to pay 10$ to work at getting better

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    1. What's the point of competing if your not facing the best? How do you expect to get better? Don't worry I'll wait....

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    2. not saying dont play vs them i just would not want to pay money to loose to them... ofc just my take on his locals I dont even have a locals to go too

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  4. I agree with you. I was okay with about the first 3 months of the format but after that it all went to shit, though like you said summer formats are usually shit.

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    1. anthony you have no clue what your talking about if people had your mind state the word would be filled with nothing but failures.we work hard to get this far,when i first started i sucked and if i gave up i would have never obtained the sucess i have thus far in yugioh and in life.I work a sales job and people are better then me should i take the same philosyphy your proposing and get fired or make no money at all. yeah losing sucks but it builds character at the same time and by the sound of it you should have so much character by now cause you must have a horrible win loss record

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    2. Perhaps i was not clear i'm not saying they should give up what i'm saying is that people seem to be intimidated not that they should be. and that a way to ease off their intimidation might be to put about that that top prize wont be so hotly contested by team o and then maybe you would get a much larger crowd so that box tournies have better turn ups from then on.

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