Saturday, September 20, 2014

Ready or Note, Here I Come



Sometimes real life gets in the way of the quest to become a great doolist.  110 hour work weeks and a ward full of leukemia have a tendency to do that.  So I am off for my first regional of the format with little or no preparation.   Oh well, at the very worst, it’s a full day to play card games. 

While nothing can take the place of careful playtesting, I did want to get a sense of the current meta. To that end, I looked at the spell and trap lineup of 34 decks that have finished in the top 8 of regionals over the past four weeks.  The results are given in the chart below: 

While this is not a complete survey, it does highlight a few trends.  The first is the lack of battle traps.  A few players are including Dimensional Fissure, but Mirror Force has all but vanished.  The bottom line is that players should not be afraid of attacking.  The second trend is the raise of non-destructive traps. In particular, Burning Abyss players are taking advantage of Phoenix Winds to put cards in their graveyard and their opponent’s cards on the top of the deck. 
 
I also took a look at the side decks from these regional tops.   The table below lists the number of times a card was included in a Side Deck divided by the number of copies available to the doolist.  For example, Maxx “C” was listed 29 times and Gran Mole six times.  The table lists Maxx “C” as 9.7 (29/3) and Gran Mole as 6 (6/1).  It’s a rather imprecise index but it does give one some idea of what is being played.  

Despite the prevalence of Vanity’s Emptiness, MST remains in the side deck.  This is reasonable given the low number of continuous spells and traps that are played.  Stygian Dirge was a bit of a surprise.  It works well against both Burning Abyss and Satellar Knights.  Chain Disappearance is also on the raise.  Banishing cards has real advantages in this graveyard dominated game. 

Hopefully the heart of the cards will be with me.  It certainly beats work.

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