Afterthought

Hi,

As promised I will talk about a couple of pointers that I learned from this years Nationals and Oceanics.

• Play testing is very important if you want to succeed. Obviously the luck factor comes into play during a tournament but knowing the meta and what cards to side in game 2 and 3 can sometimes give you an edge in a match-up. As I said previously, I should have made more effort play testing because I only found out during the tournament that Dragons pretty much swings the match-up against prophecy game 2 and 3 in their favour because of the cards they side in.

• In this format, going first matters a lot. In the 9 rounds I played over the weekend, I only won 1 die roll and in all my losses, I started second in every single time. Looking back, I reckon I would have won 3 of those games if I went first because of what I drew, but instead I had to start against Dracossack + double Super Rejuvenation, which makes it hard for me to established a board if they drew a hand trap

• Watch out for cheats and people stacking your deck. Apparently it happened quite a lot over the 3 days. I think Konami needs to do something about the way people shuffle their decks and how they cut your opponents deck

• Dragon is definitely the best deck this format. I always thought that Dragons and Prophecy are about even before the tournament, but after seeing and playing while taking into account the mechanics of the deck and post board. Dragons is by far a superior deck. Super Rejuvenation has to be banned, end of story.

• Evilswarm is not as bad as I thought they were, but you need to go first in order to set up your field. 2 out of 3 games I said I probably would have won was using Evilswarm. I could have turn 1 Ophion backed with Safe Zone against Dragons and turn 1 Ophion set Eradicator against Chain Beat. Props to Kenny and Tim for not giving up on the deck lol

• When the new cards came out, I thought the format is very skilful. I still think the same except its only for the Dragon Mirror. All other match-up is very reliant on who gets to go first

• With the amount of Douches in the game, I realised that the only reason I'm playing is because of the people I hang out with, so thumbs up again to Kenny, Sean, Jimmy, Yaowei, Moore, Xuan, Giang, Troy, Kate, Ting, Andy, Marcus, Short , Robin, Justin, Sharp and other people that I haven't mention from NSW that I talk to. That's not to say that I meet and caught up with a couple of cool people from interstate as well.

Thanks for reading. I'll try to creating something else before the end of the month


PS: Congrats to Marcus Wheeler for winning Nationals and Chris Mattiske (sorry if I spelt that wrong) for winning Oceanics. I didn't get to talk to you but I heard you're a really nice guy so good luck at worlds