The 2011 March ban list: Limited discussion

It's time to discuss the next part of the banlist; the limited list.

Limited:
Honest
Dandylion
Blackwing - Kalut the Moon Shadow
Book of Moon
Gateway of the Six

Honest has been limited from 2. It seems that with honest at 1 and Kalut the moon shadow at 1 too, konami is trying to aim for a format that emphasizes attack points. With Honest, one could attack with a ryko, knowing that it could get over any monster. While light is not the most supported attribute, it is an amazing support card that could be reused with Monster reborn and Beckoning light. But now that honest is a one man band, if you draw it, you better use it when you need to.

Dandylion was semi-limited back in march 2010. A professional duelist called Jeff Jones saw the synergy that Dandylion had with Debris dragon and Quickdraw Synchron as well as Drill warrior. With that, and a few other powerful cards, he created a tournament winning deck called Quickdraw dandywarrior. One year later, and that deck is dead, but Plant synchro took its place, which abuses dandylion to a much further extent (Mat Collins won YCS Milan with Plant synchro in November). With Debris dragon being so abusable with Dandylion, with the main combo is to summon Black rose dragon and get two tokens, it was limited to one. Konami tried to compromise this change by Semi-limiting Card trooper, which i will talk about when i write the Semi-Limited discussion

Blackwing - Kalut the moon shadow is in the same boat as Honest. It provided any blackwing monster with the attack power it needed to get over any monster. Your opponent uses his resources to summon a big monster with a beefy attack power. But with Kalut at 3, there was no need to worry about being attacked. It could be combined with shura the blue flame to ensure that you always get it's effect to special summon.

Book of moon was the big limit of the banlist. It has been at 3 this format and some people considored it a staple at 3. With its unmatched versatility (Stop attacks, flip a tuner face down to stop a synchro summon, flip your monster down to get past bottomless, flip your ryko face down when its attacked to get its effect again ETC), It is one of the best -1 cards in the game. I feel that the game is better with Book of moon at 1. However, there is now a bigger emphasis on trap stun and royal decree now that most of the backrow cards will be traps. You could run Enemy controller to replace book of moon, but it just does not compare in terms on versatility. Make sure you're running your backrow hate next format!

Lastly there is Gateway of the six. The Legendary Six Samurai have been in the OCG for almost a whole format, so the Six samurai have had enough time to prove their position as a tier one deck. But the reason why it is such a good deck is because of the broken combos when combined with Gateway of the six. With 2 Gateways on the field, you could summon one six samurai and have enough counters to search for a monster. Repeat this and you suddenly have a field full of monsters. That is why Gateway is fine at 1. The deck is still functional and Shi en is still as powerful of a card. I'm glad i traded my Gateway when it was still $30.

So thats my quick take for the Limited list. I'll post my semi-limited verdict soon!