Regs

Quick YCS Seattle Overview

I was there, I swear!

Considering I live in Washington state, and at that only about 15 to 30 minutes away from Seattle, it’s almost a given that I’m going to any YCS that takes place there. As far as YCCs go, Seattle is always smaller than other ones just due to it being less accessible and the scene in general around here being smaller thus harboring less local competitors than say California for example which just gets a free 1000 attendants just from California residents. If we count the typical Washington regional goers that’s only 300 to 400 duelists. YCS Seattle had somewhere in the mid 800s of duelists meaning it was double the size of a typical Washington event, which is pretty significant. Given that, I’m under the impression that Yugioh is going very strong, if not stronger than ever before despite this turnout being small compared to YCS events held elsewhere. A fun note, this was the largest attended Yugioh event to have ever taken place in Washington state.

I’ve been relatively inactive as far as Yugioh is concerned. You could say that I’m on the road out of the game in the duelist life cycle. The game doesn’t really provide the things for me that it once did that would make me invest any kind of significant money into it, though I still do buy singles of cards I find interesting in new sets that I don’t find over priced. In general when a person gets older there usage of money tends to get better (this is not always true of course) as well and Yugioh is becoming an increasingly larger cost sink for players to remain competitively relevant. That combines to make me want to play less since there’s an increasing gap between what I want to do in the game and what I’m able to reasonably do without tossing my paychecks into the garbage against my better judgment. That’s not to say that I think Yugioh cards are worthless, but for someone who never plays at locals or even during a general hangout with friends, paying over 30 dollars for a single card I’m only going to use literally 3 or 4 times a year seems almost idiotic. This then makes me relegated to rouge cheap decks.

Given my current scenario, and the fact that I still keep relatively up to date on Yugioh trends (I’d like to think I’m a pretty good gatherer of news of all forms not only including Yugioh), I figured YCS was pretty much a wash from the start before even getting to the event. I was pretty certain Zoodiac was going to dominate because of their massively overpowered mechanics that also had no definitive counterplay. I also have no competitive level decks so I was just going to try whatever. I initially was planning to Dinomists, but the more I tested the more I felt like I just couldn’t play against Zoodiacs. I then switched to SPYRALs but was demotivated because of my knowledge of better versions of the deck utilizing YCS prize cards. I then again switched, this time to Subterrors, which I wish I had stayed with in the end because I had a pretty slick build down that I think I would have had a lot of fun with, but after testing against my friends Infernoid deck I decided I would change yet again. I finally settled on running Artifact Kozmos and built the deck literally the night before with little to no testing, which really bit me in the but later.

I’ll save you all from a terrible deck profile because the deck variant I ran was extremely unpolished and was compounded by a random round one deck check that forced me to change my deck. I have no gripes against how the judges handled the scenario at all, I just think it was kind of unfortunate and I’m not sure I really agree with there findings, but first off I didn’t care anyways because I was expecting to lose, and there was a vein of truth to the problem and I cannot deny that the way they handled it is probably the best way to do so. More specifically this is what happened: I got a deck check, they said my Artifact Sanctums where warped so I basically would have to replace them immediately or get a game loss and if I couldn’t replace them in short order I would get a match loss. I’m not sure the current price, but as of that moment Artifact Sanctums where hovering around $40 each. That means I was going to have to drop a pretty penny to replace them, which is not happening because as I already stated, I didn’t care about this tournament almost at all, I just wanted to play some Yugioh for fun. I then told the judges to just give me the match loss because I wasn’t going to go get replacements, and then I had to edit my decklist, swapping 3 cards from my side into my main for the Sanctums. As anyone could guess I now had a massively dysfunctional deck which really shot my motivation. I later noticed I also forgot to even put Kozmo Dark Lady in my deck, so it was altogether a poopy deck.

In the end I went 3-3 drop. 1 of my losses and 1 of my wins were slightly fraudulent though so my record in its entirety is quite in question. For the first round, in which I go a match loss before we’d even played, we decided to play the game out anyway, I swapped out my side cards and played him and I won 2 out of 3. He was running Metalfoe Zoodiac, which I would wager is a good match-up for Kozmo Artifacts. I then in another round played an opponent who said before the game started that he’d give me the game no matter what at the end but he still wanted to play it out. In the end I lost in game three but he still gave me the win.

Afterwards we ate some spaghetti at the Old Spaghetti Factory. Me and Matt (of YCG podcast fame), as well as my friend Seth were all a part of my “crew”, a fancy way of saying we carpooled together and we decided early on to leave once we where statistically eliminated so after round six we were all technically out for day 2 consideration and we left. I would describe the overall experience as “meh”.

As far as the state of Yugioh is concerned, I really see no reason why Konami didn’t hit Speedroid Terrortop and Tenki preemptively in a ban list before this most recent pack. I won’t try to sugar coat anything here: I think Zoodiac is a terribly designed and boring archetype that only brings bad to the game and should be removed as much as possible. The archetype did two things I don’t think Konami should have ever made possible: XYZ monsters that require only 1 material, and an series of XYZ monsters that can all use each other as XYZ material. What makes matters worse is the fact that the meta before Zoodiacs was actually pretty good and had a lot of variety in decks at the top level and even allowed a fair amount of deck creativity. Basically all of those decks went to wayside to make way for this debacle.

If I was to do anything I would want to ban Zoodiac Drident and semi-limit Ratpier. The fact that the deck can already bust through all these utility XYZ with only one monster is already good enough so the popping-style Pleiades on top I think is a little bit much. Given the fact  that every deck has adapted what some people would consider bad cards in order to counter it gives credence to the idea that it’s unfair anyways. A similarly powerful monster, Constellar Pleiades, which is still an incredibly good monster, requires loads more investment to make and is still worth summoning. Drident is of equal caliber, but summoning one only requires one of a ton of different cards. This appears unbalanced to me.

 

Well, that’s all I’ve got, see ya next week!

Written by: Kyle Oliver

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