Just another short banlist post

It's quiet... too quiet...
Normally at this time of the year you wouldn't be able to open a ygo related site in your browser without coming across at least 10 kids bitching about how everything should be banned and just as many posting absurd banlist predictions.

It's not weird though, there is a perfectly good reason for that. This format has been balanced. Regardless of how much you hate a deck, it is true you had options for top tier decks to use and it is true you could deal with the top tier adequately if you were prepared. Sure there is a luck factor involved, but it's a card game, that's how you are supposed to play it.
If banlists in ygo did not happen at the set 6 time month intervals, a banlist would not be brought up now. If ygo was a game without banlists, no one would consider that this is a time when stuff should be banned. In fact, I would not be surprised if they decided to skip the march banlist this time around.

The fact that ygo is not being particularly absurd in regards to balance in the top tier right now, is by itself weird. At this time a deck should be overpowered and unfair causing people to bitch about it (although that mostly refers to the OCG, in the TCG we simply lack at the moment).
So what is different this time? Do we lack strong decks?
On the contrary, we have many strong decks, and that is the other issue here.
Yu-Gi-Oh! is changing, that is the theme this time around. Instead of being nerfed, strong decks are getting power ups, new archetypes are been given constant boosts, things we thought would never be released, are being released one after another. Yu-Gi-Oh! is becoming more aggressive, and at the same time because it is aggressive all around, it is balanced. Usually I wouldn't say stuff are overpowered, but that is what's happening to the game, and it is not necessarily bad, it just means the average level of "power" in ygo is going up and that is the new way the game will be played.

All that combines to make this banlist season messed up. If konami is changing policies, then how will that be reflected in the banlist? Will there even be one in this case? Those are some of the reasons I will not be making any real predictions here, instead I will be stating a lot of scenarios, even covering all of the cases at times. But before that, let me rant about the state of the game and how that picture is being put together by new releases.

We had wind-ups and atlantean mermails. With march coming up, one would predict a stop would be put on those decks, but instead konami decided to step on the gas. Bahamut Shark and Abysstrite were already decided so they are not part of it. The first thing that pointed at things changing was the Jump Festa pack for Christmas, which was releasing boosts for everyone.

There we had the release of Armor Kappa, a clear upgrade to the atlantean deck which allows diva to destroy a face-up card and then trigger an additional atlantean, while at the same time allowing them to get over their Dimensional Fissure weakness with this great piece of toolboxing. In the same pack, we had Fishborg Archer, right when people were thinking that Fishborg Blaster is never coming back now that we have atlanteans. TCG didn't forget them in Cosmo Blazar, adding Abyssteus into their arsenal. Right in the next pack we got the 4 Elemental Dragons, all 4 of which would be considered boss monsters by konami standards, yet released at once, with the water one fitting perfectly into the atlantean deck on all aspects. Maybe some of them are not direct upgrades, but without a doubt, the toolbox of a deck that was predicted to be hit, was greatly expanded instead.

But they were not unmatched. Fire Fist that started quietly as a stun deck in Cosmo Blazar got plenty of upgrades from the outside as well. That mainly refers to the level 3 engine of promotional packs (although chicken is still not out, making stun still the only competitive option), as well as their new upgrades in the latest set, their new xyz for example being a huge asset, among others. Another deck with a greatly expanded toolbox that will not be falling behind the "overpowered" status in the coming format.

A deck that was hard to see invading the top tier was prophecy. That prophecy deck gets Book of Divine Judgment, a card which when you consider a Secrets/Master combo is simply a massive plus and search card (4 books and a priestess gain in the end phase, for example).

The lucky number of WIND is 7, and with that they won't be left behind either. I brought up just the other day how with Number 42: Starship Galaxy Tomahawk and a karakuri engine you can make a +5/6 with 2 cards. In the dueling days blog it was brought up how the old divine wind/blastfan combo would now give something along the lines of a huge +5 when you factor in Drago-sac. And drago-sac is the name of the game often for them, not only are harpies much more viable with it, but level 7 is just easy to get into now with all the elemental dragons being there, all able to be summoned at a +1, as well as WIND loving the number seemingly, from harpies to planes.

At the same time the general xyz toolbox is being greatly expanded, and even though it is not as big, it should be mentioned that everyone is getting their share, even madolche for example got hootcake, a great addition which may even be promoting hybrid builds.

That all points to a pattern. Yu-Gi-Oh! is getting bigger, and a definition that will be coming up often is "overwhelming". A great example of that is Spellbook of Divine Judgment. You can just get a bunch of plusses, simple as that.

But that is not the only pattern. The other one is, a lot of tools are given to you. Usually you get a limited number of great cards, make them all work in a deck and have that top version of the deck. Now you have a lot of great cards available for many decktypes, and you can certainly not fit them all in one deck. You have the options to make different, yet still overwhelming versions of the same deck.

The third pattern is, where you can and can't loop, where you can and can't win. Surely you have noticed it but there are a lot of "you can only use the effect of 'x' once per turn" popping up, as well as cards disallowing you from doing other things which could potentially be abused, biggest example being fire fist cards and support, with Horse for example not allowing other high level special summons after its own summon, Volcano not allowing you to use the card you returned to the hand, etc. Konami is trying to close as many holes as they can to change looping into set plays. You have many great cards and obviously you can use them all together into one big play. What you are not allowed to do is use the same cards in that play.

Perhaps more importantly though, we have attack and damage restrictions. Not that you can't otk your opponent or end the game quickly. On the contrary, look at Nightmare Shark, being an open lv3 xyz, which can easily give the end game 2k damage (which means that since tour guide can get it, 2k will be becoming the danger zone), shark fortress, being a double attacker on the lv5, and the barian's force version of Utopia, being able to do huge damage. The issue is that combining the huge damage with the huge plusses gets tricky. Divine Judgment happens in the end phase, Drago-Sac can't attack if it destroys something, Fishborg Archer will destroy anything non-water that tries to battle, Hysteric Sign happens in the end phase as well, Tomahawk stops damage entirely, Brotherhood of the Fire Fist - Spirit does not allow anything that is not beast-warrior to attack at all.

That perhaps points to a different pace of play. You can get all your plusses, but you will have to sit on them for a while and let your opponent get his too. Now this is a far fetched prediction, but this is the direction the game could be taking. Perhaps we are reaching the point where your card advantage as a whole isn't as important as it was before since you can do it all over and get more cards than you need in some cases, while control of the pace of the game and control of the field actually becomes more important. At the moment, the usual win condition outside of otk is to reduce the opponent's resources in order to create a simplified gamestate in your favour and win by controlling it. Perhaps we are entering an overwhelming stage of ygo, which would involve a lot more strategy in winning the game, or at least a different kind of it, where in aggro vs aggro matchups both players would keep a large card presence and the goal would be to find a way and reduce the opponent's life points to 0. Is either way to play bad? Not really, that imaginary ygo is fine, the current one is fine too, they are simply ways to play it, and while it may seem overly aggressive, it may bring ygo closer to the way other tcgs are played.

Now let's look a bit back at the banlist. Cards are hit to bring decks to a lower level, but if the current goal is to bring everything to a higher level, then what would be hit?

If there is a prime suspect for this list, that is wind-ups. If we compare them to the atlantean decks, then wind-ups are obviously the older ones. Not only that, but the strength of wind-ups lies in the tcg exclusives which were made to break their restrictions. Cards like Magician and Factory were made keeping in mind that there would not be wind-ups which could activate from the hand, there would not be wind-ups which would have a beneficial effect and would be guaranteed to survive and that there were not going to be wind-ups which would be able to activate multiple times. 2 TCG exclusives took full advantage of that though, Wind-Up Shark and Wind-Up Rabbit created looping that was not planned. Is the deck stronger than everything else? With the current state of things, no. The problem is in the way it plays. Whether it gains as much advantage as things like atlanteans mermails or not, is not the biggest issue, but rather it is the way it does so. That refers to the looping of big plays of constant searching from the deck, allowing it to both translate 2 cards into a large field presence, a big plus and at the same time, big damage. Relativelly old + looping + tcg exclusives + simple otk potential is a great banlist recipe. The deck is kinda stale too in its builds especially when you consider what else is coming out (wind-ups don't have that many worthy tools as a whole, they mostly depend on a couple of cards, which limit the builds in comparison to new decks like fire fist and atlanteans, so you are not going to sell an entirelly new lineup of cards), it contradicts what look like those "new policies" and its longevity in the U.S. is limiting sales, reinforcing the scenario which has it hit; at the same time however it would not be strange if due to this whole power upgrade of ygo, it was deemed to be fair game and was left as is, or even indirectly aided.

On the other hand, things for mermail atlanteans are going both ways. Their set has been the one before the latest in both ocg and tcg at the moment and they have been in the top tier for the entire format. Normally I'd say it was time they got a light hit.
The situation though is not normal. As it was mentioned they are a deck favoured too strongly by new releases. That could lead into two opposite cases.
If you want to boost a deck, then why nerf it? It's counterproductive, so it wouldn't be strange if they were not hit.
However, exactly because they got many new tools and can create many new builds, it can safely be hit without losing its viability. So an opposite opinion to the one above could be that they got the boosts exactly because they wanted to hit certain aspects of it, a suggestion that makes sense as well.
If something is going to be hit, the suspects are the old cards like always. Those are deepsea diva and genex undine, with salvage among them but with a much smaller probability. New cards are a lot less likely to be hit, especially cards that came out in a structure deck, but if they do get hit, the suspect here is dragoons.

The short atlantean argument brings us once more back to the point of this banlist.
Let's take money out of the equation for a second.
When you are boosting ygo as a whole and are obviously trying to change the way it is being played (not as radically as suggested, but this is certainly turning more "violent"), would you need to slow other decks down? Perhaps you don't, perhaps you would only be using the banlist changes as a boosting tool, unrestricting things instead of restricting them.
Does that make restrictions useless from that perspective though?
Not exactly. If you are trying to change ygo, the banlist is an excelent tool. Remember the 3 patterns that were mentioned? They are part of a policy and the banlist can be used to aid in that change in policy, by restricting big strategies which go against it, the prime example coming to mind being wind-ups. At the same time, restricting certain cards can open the way to create cards which are part of strategies following those policies.
Second is up, let's put money back into the equation.
Simply put there is a viable card and strategy overload. Perhaps old strategies can't compete with the new ones, but even if that were the case, a perhaps is not certain, so when you put money back into the equation, currently viable old decks have good chances to get hit when considering the all new decks out that need some extra promotion. At the same time, unrestricting cards that aid new decks is possible, for example, same as last banlist prediction, Dark Magician of Chaos aiding Prophecy.
When everything is taken into account, now more than ever, if the bell tolls, it tolls for cards that support otks.

Now with the assumption that things will be hit, let's go through other decks.

Fire Fists are safe. Latest set in both TCG and OCG. Unless we get a radical change in policy, we won't see cards from the latest set being hit, same applies to promo sets of course.
Magicals (prophecies) are older than atlanteans, but they only made their splash recently, so it's hard to see them getting hit, especially when you consider their fair pace. The much mentioned divine judgment though could be hinting at a restriction to their search engine.
Machines, in the form of combinations of two between machina, gadget, geargia and karakuri, have been ever present throughout the format, but the trade-offs of consistency, pace or aggression in each build, make them relatively fair, while some are even supporting new cards, so as offensive engines they don't have many issues. Their control capabilities are another discussion.

Can the duel terminals be touched by the banlist? Now would be the time to see it. Some time into the later half of the format, Verz, or evilswarm, proved themselves to be strong contenders in the top tier. Even though they have been around for a while, they climbed up the tiers with their fresh support and they are as relevant as Ophion is in the metagame. That "climb" happened quite late in the format, and it will be quite a while before they can make the same splash in the TCG, even though they have been there for a while in the OCG (duel terminal releases differ greatly between OCG and TCG, TCG will only be getting tournament legal versions of the main Evilswarm lineup on April 13, while the OCG got them last January, for example. Kerykeion on the other hand, a card vital to the deck, was released on a special pack, so the time of its TCG release is unknown). They have excelent matchups against certain decks, and can create solid pseudo lockdowns, but again, their pace is fair and they are control oriented, which combined with their Duel Terminal status may allow them to fly under the banlist radar.

A hit I will make a prediction on, is Dark Worlds. They are not a great deck, and when that is combined with their severe side weakness, it is certain they won't do consistently well in a format (they are doing not ok already in fact). So if there is no problem there, what is the problem?
The problem is their use. If the DN at least is a good indication of anything (it is not), they are played A LOT. It's the new scrub friendly, taking the title away from lightsworn, as behind every bad player, you'll find a badly made dark world deck. Of course DN is not a problem for anyone. The problem irl is that it is an easily accessible deck. You will lack things but if you get 3 dark world structure decks, you can build it. Certainly, you do not really need an extra deck to make a budget dark world deck. And once you do make it good, there is not much new you will be adding. As it is a 2 part engine deck (Part 1: cards that discard. Part 2: cards that are discarded) space is made up of the theme itself. Build it once and it will carry you a long way, sturdy stuff, I'll give it that. If you go at locals, you know what I'm talking about. It's used A LOT.
That in itself is not as much of a problem. Well, it is kinda, people will settle with a deck and not invest in new cards, but not a huge problem because it will get people who are not willing to invest that much into ygo, that's the whole point of structure decks.
The problem is the Garunix vs Grapha comparison. The chaos dragon and atlantean structure deck was not self sufficient, their job was putting together great decks. But the Fire Kings were built to be self sufficient. And while Poseidra was a disappointment of a boss monster, Garunix is not. The problem Fire Kings have is consistency. Sure they blow sh1t up, the problem in a pure build is getting there and keeping it up. They have cards you'd buy the deck for, reprints and new ones alike. But it's been two and a half months after their OCG release and the Fire Kings have been making a pathetic showing. Honestly, if a kid wanted a budget deck and he had in front of him a Dark World structure deck and a Fire King structure deck, as much as I love Garunix and look down upon dark worlds, I would still tell him to pick 3 Graphas, burn goldd/silva and roll with it.
That pretty much sums it up on dark worlds, I predict a hit that will get kids out of their comfort zone. That being said, it is a low chance due to how they are doing. What it means is that there is reason and they are in danger despite not doing well.

Inzektors took their hits. The balance of the deck was reflected in the OCG format, and in the TCG, they never once adjusted to the format and actually managed to wait so long that the format was adjusted for them to do well in it, at least so long as people were not prepared. They will probably be left where they are.

Constellars are on the same situation as Verz, only with less success, meaning that they have much higher chances to avoid a hit, and they will avoid it.
Chaos Dragons have taken their blows. I can see the LS draw engine getting hit, but I can also see it being meaningless as they are switching to ninjas to abuse Lavalval Chain (which of course is great in a deck full of boss monsters), so it would not mean much. They will probably be left to be outpaced by the new decks.
Hieros (talking about hieratics...) are more or less in the same place. Even though they can still pull some otks, they actually have a weaker showing than Chaos Dragons, and will probably be left where they are.
Will chaos and Dark in general get its final hits on their bosses? Could be when you consider that elements are boosted, but then again the set after WIND is LIGHT, so we can't take for granted elements will be the only ones favoured.

Perhaps the most interesting subject here is the fate of stun. There are several things you can say about it, and that involves all 3 possibilities of how it will be affected by the banlist.
One of those things is, that a new age of aggression needs a stronger stun. Aggressive decks are better than before, but does stun need to be, more, well, stun than before?
Decks are capable of gaining more, but you could say that's none of the business of stun. The point isn't dealing with the gained advantage, it is preventing the advantage from being gained in the first place. While a normal summon can lead to a much higher advantage now than it did before, it is stopped in the same way.
Let's say that we have a plus 2 play, we'll name it play A. Then let's say we also have a plus 6 play, we'll name that play B. If solemn warning stops both of those plays, does it make a difference what advantage they could potentially get? Would a better solemn warning be needed to deal with the potential plus 6 of play B, in comparison to play A?
Of course there are other differences. Failing to stop a play has radically different consequences, but that has to do with how aggressive the stun deck is, and not it's play stopping capabilities.
The first point of view says that we need more stun to deal with more aggro. The second point of view says that the amount of aggro is irrelevant, same stun deals with it the same way. What's the third one?

The third one is policy. A bunch of new decks are released, a bunch of builds can be made. Stun however is always the same old. You may need a bunch of cards to make mermail atlantean (sure, most of them can be found easily, but still, a bunch), but for stun you have the same s/t core, some metacalls which just rotate, and to make a different stun deck you take a new small monster engine and slap it into your s/t mash. Those decks usually have a low monster count, so what you are changing is not that much. You may need new boss monsters for new decks, you will not need new solemn warnings though, and no matter how many new cool and gimmicky traps are released in every set (and there are a lot), that fact won't change. You don't need new warnings, you don't need new bottomlesses, you don't need new torrentials, you don't need new prisons and you don't need new mirror forces.
Secondly, let's look at our s/t hate. When people were asking for typhoon to be hit, we were getting night beam. Now you have 7 good pieces of s/t hate available for your deck in case you want your summons to absolutely certainly go off (1 heavy storm, 3 mystical space typhoon, 3 night beam), you are given the tools to give the finger to stun if you can sacrifice some consistency for it. And that seems to be a common theme for some formats now.
For the third point in this, let's look back at the radical prediction about a whole new type of overwhelming ygo. If we accept that one, or anything close to that one, we can point out another side of it. For that ygo to happen, konami has you summoning big monsters, gaining your big advantage and making all those big plays. If you are going to be stopped by something, that would be the equally big plays of your opponent, where your massive stuff will collide in a massive face-off of massiveness, or at least that's the dream a Japanese equivalent of Kevin Tewart had one random night apparently. Now if stun enters this game, the whole massiveness has a big chance of disappearing. Konami seems to be encouraging you to make big plays more than ever in this new boost of ygo, while stun still wants to deny them.
All of that could hint to bad times for stun. Yu-Gi-Oh! seems to be moving in a direction where stun may be the odd man out. That could mean they are left where they are with all of the s/t hate haunting them. At the same time it could mean they may get it worse than they have it now.
On the matter, once again I'll say veiler is in a dangerous spot, even if it is necessary, especially when you consider everyone plays it at 3 in the OCG.

Let's go through stun itself though and see what's up.
Everyone's favourite stun card lately is Rescue Rabbit. Rabbit with everything! Rabbit with Verz, Rabbit with Dinosaurs, Rabbit with Beast-Warriors and Fire Fist. And when Rabbit joins the party, the deck can become stun. Of course by itself it is anything but a stun card, but it is used with vanillas, the only use you have for vanillas is beatdown, therefore the deck is best used as stun, not including things like the standard Verz though.
When you take builds that include Rescue Rabbit separately, you notice they have different circumstances. Verz was discussed above, and it's not really stun anyways, more like control (It could however be the downfall of rabbit. When The Fabled, another DT archetype, was doing well in the OCG, nothing in the archetype was hit. Instead it resulted in the hit of their external support card, rabbit's cousin, Rescue Cat). Fire Fist and beast-warriors are new, they may be good, they may be not, it's all irrelevant because you don't hit new decks. Dinos are older, but at its core it's rabbit abuse, so it doesn't matter if something else is hit.
So what about Rabbit itself?
I'd say it's extremely beneficial at 2. It's not too consistent and yet it still makes decks viable. What other card would give such value to lv4 or lower vanilla beater cards? It simply opens possibilities. And by doing that, it makes builds more viable. Fire Fists for example were able to have an excelent stun build in their poor era, Heliotrope is a usable card, filling the arsenal of Evilswarm, there will actually be a point in using vanilla Artorigus, etc. In turn many aspects of the extra deck toolbox are enabled, so I'd say Rescue Rabbit has a very good place at 2 and will stay where it is, even though it promotes stun. All that is however if stun is allowed to be.

Heroes are in a very dangerous place, and for any other deck this would actually mean something. Not for heroes, as gemini beat has constantly been able to dodge the wrath of the banlist, only picking some up when they became OTK, which hurt the consistency of the OTK but gave gemini beat nothing short of a slap on the wrist.
Once again, many signs are pointing to it. It has been doing well as a stun deck this format. Among all other stun, it has been the truest of the bunch to its stun status, and has been doing so consistently. Regular gemini beat is same old stun. Alive Hero both has stun and great OTK potential, both of which seem to be taboo in their own ways in this new direction of Yu-Gi-Oh!. Regardless of whether konami is ok with stun or not, when taking new card design into account it does not seem like she is ok with aggro OTKs, and regardless she is not ok with old cards, but heroes have always been old and stun and that never made a difference. OTK did, but it is toned down. If Heroes were to be like other decks, I'd say they will definitely have a bad time in this new banlist, but because they are those same Heroes, I won't go as far as to say that.

Another hot topic is unrestricting, especially after everything that was mentioned here. I believe we are in the middle of a process of slow change, so I don't expect anything massive. I said it wouldn't be weird if we had no banlist, but I of course expect us to have one for example. I would expect a banlist which in comparison to others is unremarkable with a mild splash (which of course would have some surprise like all banlists, but that's a part of its unremarkability). That means no unrestricting a bunch of stuff or do anything radical. If I had to predict anything radical to happen, I would leave it for September. Still, I would expect a couple of big unrestrictions of cards that don't loop/otk/break mechanics. Chaos will probably not be seeing much help to it, it seems like it's the time of the elements. Still, as it was mentioned, I wouldn't be surprised with DMoC as extra Prophecy support. On the same note, as many have brought up many times, Magician of Faith is not as good at the moment, the victims of goats can start coming back gradually. Bulb will give a lot of strength to some decks, perhaps too much, but at the same time, konami's excuse for banning it is more invalid than ever, and some new decks could use it. If not, limited spore seems redundant, although I do see some point, but it is too small. Book of Moon could be loosened up, but that comes back to the stun discussion, as it could be a potential boost to it. Striker is close there as agents are not getting any higher than the new decks, but again stun issues. Even though it's the time of WIND it's tough to imagine an extra boost to plant synchro by unrestricting dandy/tengu. Most other cards would fall under loops/otks/mechanic breaking and chaos, so they are hard to see coming out.

That's just about it. Looking back, a mindless rant without start, middle or end. Anyways, to sum up, my predictions are:
Goat control unbanned, everyone has to sacrifice their firstborn to the goat gods, bring yata-lock, exchange of the spirit and painful choice back, they more balanced than mermail.
No banlist, banlists are for *******, anarchy for ygo,
OR
every OCG card banned, the entire new set banned before it comes out, too stronk, everything with a water attribute banned, all traps banned, everything with wind-up in its name banned, except from machines. No machines banned. I love machines. Limiter removal to 4.

Pick one. Or mix and match.

Al-bhed out.

Great read as always, Bhed. Loved it.

Or maybe people here just don't care about ygo.....if you are reffering to wda

Took me about 5 stages of partial reads to finally get over the whole article. Really nice analysis of the current state of the game and very logical predictions.
GIVE ME MY STRIKER BACK.

well when rabbits and heavy storms and dark wankers and OP stuff like that wernt made the game wud be fun.. and if people made their own decks ofc..

Best article I've ever read on a banlist prediction /meta analysis. This is really good

Good article. I'd like to see more prediction about how much will they hurt current decks, like the cards itself - more importantly what cards do you feel like are worthy of being 'hit'. For example - Ban BLS, Limit Rabbit, semi-limit Wind-up Factory ~like that.

Less on the OCG, since we all know OCG is not relevant, even tho some people still go around thinking that OCG matters - well it doesn't. On the competitive side of the game is just TCG. Now, its good to 'keep an eye' in the OCG world, but don't think that it is that important.


Also no, DMoC is broken and it needs to be banned, having 2 heavy, 2 dark hole, 2 reborn, 2 POA is insane.
Here is a scenario - You draw Monster Reborn - Special opponents DMoC, add reborn again.
Not going to happen. Faith is the same...
Dandy to 2 is... not going to happen.
Tengu to 3 - not, 100% not... too much support for Beast-Warriors, they will not get Tengu as well.


Overall like I said, good article. Only thing is that I'd like to see more about individual cards being hit, not so much about the decks.

> Just another short banlist post

I've been had.

L.Lawliet wrote:

Good article. I'd like to see more prediction about how much will they hurt current decks, like the cards itself - more importantly what cards do you feel like are worthy of being 'hit'. For example - Ban BLS, Limit Rabbit, semi-limit Wind-up Factory ~like that.

Less on the OCG, since we all know OCG is not relevant, even tho some people still go around thinking that OCG matters - well it doesn't. On the competitive side of the game is just TCG. Now, its good to 'keep an eye' in the OCG world, but don't think that it is that important.


Also no, DMoC is broken and it needs to be banned, having 2 heavy, 2 dark hole, 2 reborn, 2 POA is insane.
Here is a scenario - You draw Monster Reborn - Special opponents DMoC, add reborn again.
Not going to happen. Faith is the same...
Dandy to 2 is... not going to happen.
Tengu to 3 - not, 100% not... too much support for Beast-Warriors, they will not get Tengu as well.


Overall like I said, good article. Only thing is that I'd like to see more about individual cards being hit, not so much about the decks.

I disagree with your arguement. I don't believe that Konami cares too much of what is "annoying" to players. No. If they want the game to steer in one direction, they will do what they need to to pull it off. DMOC being unbanned or not is irrelevant to the case. Sure, he will be a staple and a tech for Prophecy. Sure he will be abused. It doesn't matter in the long run in this "aggro-age".

If anything, if they were to unrestrict, ban, limit, anything to do with editting the ban list, it would be a better interest in a business aspect as well as policy. This article highlights on those two factors as well as the metagame rather than stating specific examples.

That brings me to another point as to why the OCG matters for TCG players. We are playing the same game, except one is in the future and the other is in a slower pace that likes its capitalism. The OCG has all of the cards that the TCG will use, except exclusive cards that make its of impact, and the OCG offers insight on strategies to counter the "next hit decks" in the TCG.

Lets keep all of this in mind and also consider the possibility of TCG exclusives. We know from TGU and the WU that exclusives make huge differences. However, lets not dismiss this from the points I made above. We play our game to adjust to these excluwives as well as all of the decks strategies that mirror from the OCG.

Now is that any reason to ignore the OCG as well as considering both meta games? Of coarse not. If we can see how the OCG works, we can prepare ourselves, as TCG players, for what is to come.

Great article, Al. I believe you have scored the article achievement many times over.

i just want heavy banned, i dont care about laggia :[

coolchemist2001 wrote:

GIVE ME MY STRIKER BACK.

Here you go.

Great article too, Al-bhed.

''short banlist post'' *looks at topic* I think you need to edit that.