Tuesday 27 March 2012

YCS Long Beach Analysis

Hello readers. Now that the largest tournament on record is over, we can now say congratulations to the winner, Michael Balan. He piloted Dark world all the way to victory. Its causing a big stir and is making players wonder: "When will a tier 1 deck win an American YCS?". There are many reasons why none of the 3 have won yet, but that's for another post.

Now to analyse the top tables, Starting with the top 16. The cut was actually the top 64 due to the high number of players, but I noticed how bad some of the top 64 decks were. They all had expensive cards like Maxx "C" and Fiendish chains which helped then get that far. But to get anywhere past the top 32, you have to be a skilled player and that will always triumph over buying your way through the tournament.

Top 16:
7x Dino Rabbit
3x Wind-up (2 of them being the wind-up beast variant)
2x Skill Drain Heroes
1x Piper Chaos
1x Dark World
1x Inzektors
1x Chain Burn

A total of 8 different decks in the top 16. That's actually the complete opposite to what most of the playerbase were expecting to see.  In such a large event, there are going to be a lot of different decks and because of that, there are going to be more in the top tables. nearly all of the dino rabbit decks were placed against eachother, reducing their numbers by half no matter what. Was this deliberate? I don't know.

There's only 1 Inzektors, once again showing their weakness when playing the other top decks. I guess when it comes to general play, the deck is pro and annoyingly good. But when its pitted against skilled and professional players with the best decks of the format, it falls short.

At this point i was rooting for Piper Chaos to win. I saw the build before the YCS and I couldn't wait to see how it fared. It's by far the sleeper deck at the moment and it's inherent ability to generate massive advantage with Mystic piper allows it to recover from a Wind-up loop easier than most decks.

Now for the Top 8:
3x Dino Rabbit
1x Wind-Up (Beast Variant)
1x Piper Chaos
1x Skill Drain Heroes
1x Dark world
1x Inzektors

Due to the dino rabbits playing eachother in the top 16, the diversity of the top 8 is kept high. 2 Wind-up decks were knocked out and it reduced their chance of winning to just 12.5%, ignoring other extra factors. Inzektors managed to hang in there, which keeps them at their tier 1 status. Dark world at this point, was starting to raise some eyebrows due to their poor showing in previous YCSs. Of course we know how it did, but at this point, all eyes were on the other rogue decks.

Finally, the top 4:
1x Dino Rabbit
1x Dark world
1x Piper chaos
1x Skill Drain Heroes

4 completely different decks, all with extremely skilled duelists piloting them. The person playing Skill Drain heroes has a Yugitube channel called YGOTRADER101. He just posted a video of his build and goes in depth on his deck. And guess what, it's got no Bubbleman in it!

Anyway, Dino rabbit's numbers had been cut down to just 1 left, which was piloted by Simon He; a European duelist. He is well known for his good yugiohs and at this point, was the favourite to win. I was still rooting for Piper Chaos: the underdog deck. At this point though, all decks had an equal chance of winning and it all came down to their luck.

Skill drain heroes and Piper chaos were both knocked out, leaving Simon He and Michael Balan to duke it out in the final. Due to graphas ability to keep coming back and rabbits relying on the Evolzars for their power, it's not a good matchup for the latter deck. The deck would have to rely on it's solemn warnings to keep it off the field long enough to get 8000 damage through. Unfortunately, Dark world did win and you can see how it went Here.

So yeah, that's enough analysis from me. A surprisingly diverse tournament consisting of a whopping 16 rounds in total for the final 2 players. Until next time!

No comments:

Post a Comment