Random area of broken meta?

Alright, I know this is probably going to sound relatively unusual, but lately (Specifically since the release of Set 8) I have been seeing an utter lack of Dragonic Overlord, The End and MLB play in my local area. I am in an area with quite a heavy population of Cardfight! Vanguard players, to the point that our two local cards shops hold three different tournaments a week, each one with a resulting turnout of easily upwards of twenty people. While not to say that Dragonic Overlord, The End and MLB are unplayed entirely, they most certainly aren't the most common decks in my area. Actually, in all honesty I see a relatively even divide between every clan. All in all, I was just wondering what people think about this. Am I just extremely lucky to live in the area that I live in? Or is this a trend that people are seeing everywhere?

On a side note, at one of the local card shops I mentioned, a box tournament with a $10 entrance fee is held roughly once a month. These particular tournaments typically garner a turn-out of thirty-five to fifty players, and to my knowledge, there has not been a single instance so far in which Dragonic Overlord, The End or MLB won the tournament. (There was one instance where a Dragonic Overlord, The End player made it to the final game, but was absolutely annihilated by a Pale Moon, Luquier player.)

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I have been seeing an utter lack of Dragonic Overlord, The End and MLB play in my local area.

This is the exception rather than the rule. Consider yourself both fortunate and a statistical outlier according to the recent tournament data. Mind sharing where you live in case others in your area want to take advantage of your (for now) seemingly better meta?

My meta is similar with the only person who has Dragonic Overlord, The End taking it apart because he can't win with it and the mlb players failing badly enough that they switch decks. Most of my meta is dark irregulars, pale moon, and non Dragonic Overlord, The End Kagero.

I live in Rochester, New York. The primary meta here has a tendency to shift by the week, but of late I have seen an unbelievable amount of Tachikaze, Aqua Force and non-MLB Royal Paladin.

>implying three people makes a meta

Still just Spike Bros, Bermuda Tri, and Tachikaze here, lol.

Yeah, we have Great Nature(Apt and Bison), D-police(Me! Mostly Zeal and Daiyusha), Nova Grappler(Stern), Narukami(Vermillion), and all three of the pally clans.

Gris wrote:

My meta is similar with the only person who has Dragonic Overlord, The End taking it apart because he can't win with it and the mlb players failing badly enough that they switch decks. Most of my meta is dark irregulars, pale moon, and non Dragonic Overlord, The End Kagero.

PFFFFFFFFFFFF HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH OH MY GOD.

If you lose consistently with Dragonic Overlord the End and Majesty Lord Blaster...just give up at Vanguard. No really. I have nothing I could possibly teach them. Only someone playing their very first game who barely knows the rules could fail that badly.

I never played against the Dragonic Overlord, The End player with his Dragonic Overlord, The End deck but I have only lost to him once which was his aqua force against my musketeers (from that match I learned he likes to overguard a lot). One of the mlb players had 20 triggers until he showed us his build.

my meta is pretty small, actually. only about 12 or so players, i think. there's one MLB player who consistently tops the weekly tournaments. I give him a good run for his money with my shadow paladins when i bother to show up. beyond that, we just now got a player with a completed Dragonic Overlord, The End deck. it's mostly gold paladin, dark irregular, shadow paladins, and a few new daiyusha build dimension police players. a lot of the other clans have scattered memberships here and there as secondaries.

Alarrick wrote:

Alright, I know this is probably going to sound relatively unusual, but lately (Specifically since the release of Set 8) I have been seeing an utter lack of Dragonic Overlord, The End and MLB play in my local area. I am in an area with quite a heavy population of Cardfight! Vanguard players, to the point that our two local cards shops hold three different tournaments a week, each one with a resulting turnout of easily upwards of twenty people. While not to say that Dragonic Overlord, The End and MLB are unplayed entirely, they most certainly aren't the most common decks in my area. Actually, in all honesty I see a relatively even divide between every clan. All in all, I was just wondering what people think about this. Am I just extremely lucky to live in the area that I live in? Or is this a trend that people are seeing everywhere?

On a side note, at one of the local card shops I mentioned, a box tournament with a $10 entrance fee is held roughly once a month. These particular tournaments typically garner a turn-out of thirty-five to fifty players, and to my knowledge, there has not been a single instance so far in which Dragonic Overlord, The End or MLB won the tournament. (There was one instance where a Dragonic Overlord, The End player made it to the final game, but was absolutely annihilated by a Pale Moon, Luquier player.)

I go to the same shops, and I know we have two people who currently own The End in its entirety, but do not play it actively. It is funny, too, because I know we have seen a Megacollony or two, which is higher than active players of the aforementioned 'big decks'.. as well as three or more Pale Moon players.

For what it is worth, I believe people likely gravitated to something new instead of something that has been relatively static - and possibly, not all that interesting anymore.

We had a player came to our shop from his other store that ran both Dragonic Overlord, The End and MLB, he was a decent enough player constantly topped with them. Then Zeal came out and kept losing to me over and over again and now he doesn't show up anymore I presume he went to his original shop.

It doesn't seem to me like a broken area of the meta. As Numerology pointed out there are people that have "The End" decks in the shop you play at, they just don't use them as much, or at all. It's the same with my locals. I have a "The End" and MLB deck (shame on me, I know), but I don't play either on a regular basis. It doesn't feel right to me to play those decks when others can't or won't. So I'll play clans/decks that I like, such as Lawkeeper, Narukami, Nova Grapplers, or Gold Paladins, and I find that my games are more enjoyable than if I were running "The End" or MLB. When I'm feeling ultra competitive or someone is running either of those decks then I'll play mine, otherwise I like to make things interesting, and it seems to be the same way at your shop.

Numerology wrote:

For what it is worth, I believe people likely gravitated to something new instead of something that has been relatively static - and possibly, not all that interesting anymore.

This is actually the rarity. Look at the tournament results and you'll see an overwhelming saturation of hamburgers--specifically The End as the major deck. But yes, it only took the entire community about 2-3 weeks from BT05 release to realize how broken and nonsensical these cards were and a lot of interest in vanguard and competitive play was lost. I can imagine some people making their tournament decks and then making casual decks on the side. Just bear in mind that while casual play is really nice, it doesn't solve the problem for when it actually matters--competition.

Much worse than the casual decks not beeing able to compete with MLB and Dragonic Overlord, The End at the moment, is the fact that we already know that for the next 3 sets the only current "casual" decks that will receive some decent support to make them competitive enough are Ezel, Spectral Duke and Vermillion. And 2 of those 3 become Hamburger-Time decks then, so it doesn't make sense to invest in them if you're trying to avoid Hamburger-Time.

I could understand people investing into a couple of fun casual decks if they had hopes that they would become competitive in the future, but since Bushiroad started printing pretty much only sub-type support in the new sets, everything older becomes useless.

Actually even Duke stays fully casual. He doesn't have the capacity to compete with hamburgers of any kind which will be Tier 2 for anything that aren't MLB and The End. It really does set up what I predicted: a tier system with Tier 1 being the most broken BS in the game, The End and MLB. Tier 2 being all other Hamburger-Time. And Tier 3 being non-Hamburger-Time. With only a few exceptions like Stern in Tier 3 being a direct counter to all Tier 2 Hamburger-Time (they rely on limit break) but still Tier 3 since he's not capable of partially competing with Tier 1.

It's really fucked up and dumb. With this kind of tier system, I'm just reminded of yugioh.

Let's not forget that Bushiroad has pet clans. They love United Sanc and Dragon Empire. Specifically Gold Paladin, Royal Paladin, Kagero and Narukami. Wanting anything else to be equally competitive is delusional at this point since they've been doing it for 11 sets.

I'm curious to see if Bushi implements the same restrictions that they did in Japan once set 9 hits. I may be mistaken but I think that set 9's release was close to when the restriction list was announced and then went into efect shortly after for "The End" and MLB (OTT too, but that's off topic).

Having seen the results from the Stand-Up Cup Challenge, and 5/8 of the field being "The End" decks, combined with the announcement of the upcoming sets (nothing really until October), giving a significant time between sets 9 and 10 that the two could warrant a restriction. Which would cripple MLB and pretty much kill "The End". I was thinking that the timetable for releases between sets 9 and 10 were going to be shorter, thus making a restriction pointless, but now..... I don't know. It would be nice completely axing the tier 1 decks. However, it will probably just be replaced with the current tier 2 decks, but I think there is a slightly smaller power gap between tiers 2 and 3. I'm sure Alice would have a better idea of that gap though.

One of the reasons that contributed to me not competing anymore (There were a lot), was not knowing if The End would just get banned right before the Bt09 release just like in Japan. I wasn't sure if they'd ban anything at all, and if so I assumed it would be the clans that topped the most (obviously with MLB and The End being most likely to do so). Since I couldn't know if it would be a total waste of an investment to convert all my cards into that, I didn't bother. I think that's a real problem with games which have banlists. People who don't have a lot of money to constantly switch decks just to stay competitive are left out. Which is yet another problem with printing broken cards in the first place.

I can tell you that if they did do the world a favor and put those rabid dogs down, the LB-nature of the new Hamburger-Time would make them Stern's bitch. I've done a lot of testing with an Eisenkugel Stern deck against them quite a long time ago when someone pointed it out. Also if Reijy was more consistent, then he could keep them at bay as well. It wouldn't stop there being a problem but it would have more counters than the current meta. Where you could play one of ~6 decks with at least 1 deck that counters all of them and does about equally well against decks that aren't those ~7. Zeal might qualify too, but I haven't retroactively tested him. As might any deck that can make tons of vanilla power columns (18k-22k) in the rear-guard position with some kind of skill somewhere that can hold units before their limit break (like Stern). I'll try and test Zeal and Reijy retroactively with the new hamburgers to see if there might be ~9 playable decks in that case. But even with the seven, that's more than the two that exist right now. And will continue to exist through the life of BT09 unless they're gotten rid of.

Alice wrote:

I think that's a real problem with games which have banlists. People who don't have a lot of money to constantly switch decks just to stay competitive are left out. Which is yet another problem with printing broken cards in the first place.

Agreed 100%

Alice wrote:

the LB-nature of the new Hamburger-Time would make them Stern's bitch.

I was going to include something similar in my last response and it sliped my mind as I was typing and proof-reading, but every time I've forgotten to post something, you post it anyway (I have like 3 posts, but still..). I've never really thought that "The Blood" and "Platinum" were viable Hamburger-Time additions with their ridiculously high LB's. Understandably though, a 13k body is a 13k body,but in playtesting both I never expected to use either ability because I'm not going to run my damage that high just to use an ability that won't asuredly finish a game for me, and I found that in most cases (about 6/10 games) I never used them. I was better off using plain 'ole Vermillion's ability, and had better success.

Your testing confirms what I had been thinking regarding the tier 2 to 3 gap, so thanks for providing that information.

Their LBs aren't really excusable just because they're at 5: the skills are way overpowered nonsense (except Blood...what the fuck were they thinking? Crits do NOT work in late game!). However, it just so happens that there are decks that directly counter that sort of thing. Also yes, since the 13k is what counts, the ridiculous part is where Plezel actually has a chance to not only burger Turn 3, but it can do it with an opponent still at grade 2. It's not even that uncommon as you can see in the article I did on superior rides. Anyone who could look at a card capable of 13k body against a grade 2 opponent and say "yep, fair" needs to get out.

Yeah no prob on the testing. I'm currently doing some other tests as well, starting with BT10. Just an early start to settle a question about Descendant and his place in the cosmos.

Alice wrote:

Their LBs aren't really excusable just because they're at 5: the skills are way overpowered nonsense (except Blood...what the fuck were they thinking? Crits do NOT work in late game!). However, it just so happens that there are decks that directly counter that sort of thing.

I didn't want to make it seem like they are excusable at LB5 because the likelihood they'll be used is low. Just that I don't expect to use them, because at 5 damage I've pretty much lost the game anyway, and eating damage to use the ability thinking it's going to win the game for me is just silly also. The reason to use those two is pretty much for the 13k body (at least during this stretch of available sets), and on the off chance I actually pull off the LB ability, that would just be icing on the cake. They are just no where near as strong as The End ability wise.

Alice wrote:

Yeah no prob on the testing. I'm currently doing some other tests as well, starting with BT10. Just an early start to settle a question about Descendant and his place in the cosmos.

Just jumping in here to point out that I been doing quite a bit of testing around Descendant as well to see just how useful he is, and also because I had to put up with a handful of people in my area raving about how broken he is. After considerable testing I have come to the conclusion that while he is Good... He isn't even remotely broken, and he has one of the riskiest abilities I have ever seen. Plain and simple, Narukami aren't exactly known for their hand size, and against any deck that can pressure the Narukami player heavily enough, his skill is quite difficult to actually get off. When the ability does go off, it is extremely powerful... At an extremely high price. If your opponent manages to somehow survive Dragonic Descendant's second attack, you essentially doomed on the following turn. As a result, my overall opinion of EDD, is that while his skill is quite strong it comes at such a high price that I personally don't find it to be useful.

That of course is just my personal findings however, and anyone and everyone are welcome to disagree with me.

I do not, for one second, think you used proper controls to reach that conclusion. So far my tests have shown exactly the opposite in every area and I'm almost done.

Funnily enough, I was looking ahead at the future sets' card lists and seeing more and more of these 13k bodies which is pretty depressing to me. Guess I'll have to lay low competition-wise for awhile...