06.28.08
Bleach at Bizu
Last tuesday, we held the 1st ever Makati HL for Bleach at Bizu Patisserie in Greenbelt 2. Now that’s a fancy place to play card games in, but the Bizu guy Red Viper came through for us and graciously hosted the event, so everyone who came had fun and enjoyed the really good food that was served. It was especially a great night for “Davs”, who won the tourney with his impressive Spirits deck. Congratulations Davs! hehehe =P
In other Bleach news, I played my Renji Soul Reapers deck last night at XP, as I hadn’t played it in a while and wanted a fun deck. Sadly it didn’t win a lot of games, partly because of bad matchups and partly because I couldn’t get out Renji’s Bankai early on in the games that I lost. Hihio Zabimaru is so critical to the deck’s success, with everyone packing Balances and Passing Overs all over the place. But the deck performed as well as it could, so I can’t be too hard on my guy Abarai (yeah, I’m a rhyming monster, hehehe).
Tonight will be the 2nd Bleach Regionals, a fight for the honor of being the Squad 2 Captain. That’s Soi Fon’s honor at stake, baby! The competition has improved over the months though, so it will an uphill battle to claim my fame as a Taicho. Wish me luck! ^_^
06.22.08
Chopsuey 2.0
Last weekend, I let my Student deck rest for a while, since it still needed some tweaks. Instead, I decided to bust out one of my “think tank” creations, which I’ve had a decklist written for but never really bothered to put together until last week. I knew it had potential, but I was quite surprised and pleased that it went undefeated in the 2 HLs that I played. It’s a deck with no unifying theme or trait, but instead relies on efficient resource management. Hence, I call it Chopsuey 2.0, after my original chopsuey deck that had everyone wondering what the hell it was supposed to do, hehehe.
One of my favorite characters for this deck is also its Guardian:
I never realized how useful that ability is until I tried it out. It’s resource efficiency at its finest. Makes me wonder how good the upcoming Dual Energy cards are in the Bounto set (coming this July! ack!). Of course, Sosuke becomes better with his trusty and trusting lieutenant:
Momo cry! Momo smash! Of course, it’s not often that I had both Sosuke and Momo out together, but on the games that I was able to, Momo just made the matches end faster than they had any right to.
I have another deck in the “think tank”, but I’m not sure if I’ll have the time to cobble it together for the weekend. It has the potential to be better than both chopsuey decks that I’ve built in terms of consistency, but I think its problem will be a reduction in controlling tempo by speed. I’ll have to build it and find out for myself first, hehehe.
06.21.08
Oh MUN, Where Art Thou?
If you’ve noticed that I haven’t written much about VS recently, that’s because I haven’t been playing the game for the past few weeks. Why? There are a couple of reasons. Primarily it’s about my new work, but not entirely because of the nature of the job. See, the main VS Hobby League occurs during Friday nights, and I’ve been a loyal player for who knows how long already. But since I’m new to the company I work for, I have to acquiant myself with my new teammates and batchmates, and part of that process is going out during Friday nights to relax and unwind. Not that I am forced to join in these gimiks, ‘coz I’m actually trying not to be anti-social this time around, hehehe.
The number 2 reason is, honestly, because of the existing player base. There are people I enjoy playing against, and then there are those who almost everyone agrees that aren’t really fun to play or hang out with. The latter usually use the same crutch engines for their decks (*cough* Checkmate *cough*) and pass them off as “new” decks since they involve a different secondary team to team-up with. These people also whine a lot when they actually lose, hehehe. We’ll label these players as The Pros. They think themselves as pros in this game ‘coz they can netdeck the latest toys from the actual pros on VSRealms.
Now I personally don’t mind playing against powerful decks, as long as they bring something fresh to the table. But it’s the new or recurring players that I am worried about, or those regulars who can’t afford to buy some of the power staples of the game. They either lose a lot to the The Pros and stop attending the HLs, or lose a lot to The Pros and stop having fun while still hanging on to the game. The community tries hard to change formats regularly so that players are forced to use new decks once in a while, but the moment the tourneys revert back to the familiar Ages, the meta simply goes back to being boring.
So if we combine reason 1 with reason 2, we get a graymalkin who hasn’t been attending some of the last few HLs, hehehe. Why should I attend an uninteresting tournament when I can have fun socializing with new friends (particularly girls, but that’s not for this blog, hehehe) ? Of course, I don’t mean to stop playing VS on Friday nights altogether, as it is still fun smashing with superheroes. But now I don’t have to be guilty when I miss an HL or two.
There is also a 3rd reason, and something that I think is in common with most everyone who plays locally. It’s the lack of new products! We’ve had shortages of MVL and DCL, and now it looks like MUN will even be worse. It was sold out within a week of release in the US (a week!), so our hobby store owner’s distributors are having problems getting the cases we pre-ordered and paid for a few weeks ago. We’re not even sure at this point if there are still enough products that will reach our shores.
This is a huge concern not only for me, but also for the community. Obviously, the game cannot evolve without new cards, especially if said cards are some of the most powerful and flavorful cardboards the game has ever seen. I mean, I haven’t read every card from MUN yet, but I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen so far. I want to get my hands on the Avengers! And Captain America’s legendness, hehehe. Without MUN stocks, we’ll be stuck with our same old cards and same old meta.
I’ll try to end this rant or whatever with something positive though… Bleach rocks! ^_^
OK, I’m kidding, hehehe! No, really, Bleach rocks, but VS is still better. So here’s hoping that our distributors won’t fail us and deliver MUN to our doorsteps within the next few weeks. ^_^
06.15.08
Squad 2 Trial Mission – Part 1
I’ve managed to playtest my latest Bleach creation, the Squad 2 deck, for the past week. The good news is that it has played better than my expectations, as it has managed to put up good fights against other Squad decks. The bad news is that it hasn’t won a lot of its matches, hehehe.
How does the deck compete? Being primarily a stall deck, it drags out the game by discouraging the opposing party from making early attacks. But in order to do so, you need the lynchpin of the deck out in the field as early as possible. And that card is:
Once her power is online (which is your next turn after you recruit her), Soi Fon – Squad 2 Captain stops the biggest character on the other side from attacking, since it would be pointless to do so unless the player has a trick up his sleeve. She’s the best card in the entire deck, but unfortunately her ability also limits the way you can construct your deck. Your field has to have an all Squad 2 line-up for her to do her thing, so we can’t have other Soul Reapers as guest stars. This might not be much of a problem if the squad had many characters, but alas, we only have her, her lieutenant Marechiyo, one version of Yoruichi that belongs to Squad 2, and two versions of Stealth Force Members, which are the non-unique ninjas of the team.
That’s only 5 characters to build a deck around with! We have other versions of Soi Fon to tinker with, but they only serve certain roles in certain situations, unlike the Squad 2 Captain which you always want out in the field. Besides the Squad 2 Lieutenant, Marechiyo is practically useless in his other versions. Even after adding the good and generic Repentance Cell Guards (which is being played in every Squad deck), we are still left with a very restricted line-up.
Well, that’s all I can talk about right now. Part 2 will deal with whatever I can think of to say then, hehehe. ^_^
06.08.08
Struggling Students
The new schoolyear is almost upon us, and it’s a coincidence that my Ichigo Students deck debuted last weekend at the Bleach HLs. Basically, it uses Ichigo as the guardian, and plays out most of the efficiently costed students, most notably the new Students featured in the Bankai set.
Kanisawa and Shuhei both add to the theme for which the Students are most famous for: burn. They also have decent-to-good stats for their cost, so they immediately made the cut. There were other new Student cards from Bankai, but I feel that these two really help the early to midgame of the deck, where it has struggled in the past against the faster decklists.
Unfortunately, the results have been less then ideal. I went 2-1 (2 wins, 1 loss) last Friday for 3rd place, then went 2-2 last Saturday for 5th place, even with some tweaking to the decklist. Admittedly, I made some mistakes in those 2 matches that I lost, once for not defending with every boost I had, and the other for defending when I didn’t really have to. They were simply two sides of the same coin.
But I don’t feel that bad about the Students’ performance, as I still feel that they have what it takes to hang with the top decks, even without complete sets of the staples. I just need to reduce the mistakes I make especially during the last few turns, and of course, I’ll need better luck like everyone else, hehehe.
It may be time to try out something new again this weekend. We’ll see. ^_^
06.07.08
Heralds of Doom
We had a Silver Age HL for VS last night, and since I didn’t have the time nor the desire to create an entirely new deck, I played one of my trusty oddball creations, hehehe. It’s a Doom/Heralds team-up whose entire point is to play the following combo:
Kindred Spirits
0-cost Plot Twist
Search your deck for up to two Heralds of Galactus character cards, reveal them, shuffle your deck, and put those cards on the top of your deck.
Shape Change
1-cost Plot Twist
Put the top card of your deck into your KO’d pile. Target defender you control gets -X ATK and +X DEF this attack, where X is the cost of the card put into your KO’d pile this way.
Can you see the cheapness? Search for a high drop HoG character (say, 8-cost Tyrant), put it on top of your deck, then play Shape Change to brickwall an attack. Hahaha! ^_^
Sadly, I never pulled off this trick last night. Not once, hehehe. So I ended up with a 1-2 record. Still, it was fun piloting the deck again, as it wasn’t the usual combat curve deck that I am usually associated with. Plus, it was another excuse to play Doom. =P
06.06.08
MUN Preview – Carrying the Torch
TBS was kind enough to give VS.Skillze its very own preview card for the Marvel Universe expansion!
And by “give VS.Skillze its very own preview card”, I meant that he e-mailed it to me personally, hehehe. ^_^
You can check out the preview article here:
http://vs.skillze.com/viewtopic.php?id=601
It took me nearly 4 hours to write that up last night, which prevented me from doing the other stuff I had planned to do, like make a new decklist for Bleach or watch a random movie that I copied from some of my new friends at work. It was well worth the time and effort though, as the card is very good and deserves the treatment that it got.
Hopefully everyone who read the article enjoyed it as much as I had fun in writing it. ^_^
06.04.08
TBS is awesome!
Something arrived in my inbox the other day. It’s verrrry purty.
Stay tuned, my VS comrades. ^_^
06.01.08
I Am Chojiro, Squad 1 Lieutenant!
The 1st Bleach TCG Squad 1 Regionals concluded last night at XP, and I must congratulate cruboy for winning the event! ^_^
The win gave him the title of Squad 1 Captain for the year, some cool prizes including packs, a tin, and a shirt, and of course the bragging rights associated with being a taicho (captain), hehehe. I lost to him in the finals, which gave me 2nd place and the title of Squad 1 fukutaicho (lieutenant). I also got some packs and a tin, which are always awesome. Everyone seemed to have fun, as the atmosphere was very casual and there were always jokes flying around even during matches.
The event was Sealed, and I opened the Soi Fon-Yamamoto starter set, but by now everybody knew that the strongest starter set was the one with the 6-drop Hanataro that gained you 3 life everytime he depleted. I managed to beat one of these decks during round 1, thanks to some lucky draws that enabled me to make some early damage to offset the life gain. Alas, cruboy’s deck didn’t fail him in the finals, and my worst fears unfolded when Hanataro hit play on turn 3 and started turning back the admittedly miniscule damage my weenies were dealing.
And that is how cruboy became old man Shigekuni Genryusai Yamamoto – 1st Division Captain (squad and division being the same thing, depending on how you translate the Japanese term goteijusantai, hehehe). As Chojiro Sasakibe – 1st Division lieutenant, it is now my duty to pose as another old man serving his captain, and to take his place should anything happen to him (oh wait, that only applies in beauty pageants, hahaha!).
I’ll see you guys in the next Regionals! ^_^
