About the banlist, and the state of the game

*Beware: Wall of texts

Everyone's discussing the F/L list for September now

In my opinion, no matter how skillful the Dragon/Prophecy mirror matches are, this format is still shit. Matches depend too much on the coin toss, and on the starting hands

Just like any other year, the March formats (National formats) were full of shit, and the September ones were always better

Wandering around some blogs and forum threads, I've seen various possible options for the banlist to make the game "balanced" (from the point of the banlist speculator)

Ban/limit Judgment Day
Ban/limit Rejuvenation
Ban the Baby Dragons
Limit Secret and/or Magician
Limit Gold Sarcophagus
Semi-limit the Big Dragons
....

The whole point of all those things were to hit Dragons and Prophecies. I'm not saying that's not needed. Of course Dragons and Prophecies should be hit, but how?

Let's consider. Just a little behind Dragons and Prophecy, there're a lot of good/decent decks out there. Mermail (top 8 Europe), Evilswarm (of course. Anti-meta, or just 2550 body pressing with free Lances), Constellar (Pleiades is good, Paladynamo is good, Shock Master is good), Fire Fist (Chicken/Rooster and Wolfberg confirmed), Dragunities (check my older posts)...

Going more rogue, there're also: Infernities (Lavalval Chain is a bitch, and now there's Transturn to turn used Necromancer into brand new Archfiends), Karakuri (Transturn Merchant into Ninishi, start the drawing whore, Iron Calls and Redox abuse,...), Hieratic (there's a new normal dragon monster which is tuner, DARK, level 6, and Dragodrad whatever, to pair with the former for Trident Dragion), and more

So, if there's no more Dragon and Prophecy (or assume Konami nerfs them into something like the non-Zenmaity version of Wind-Ups), what will be the top deck?

Obviously Mermails. They have Stream, Tidal, Abyssgaios, the rank 7 access (Abyssteus, Abyssmegalo, the Dragons, Abyss-Sphere) while also have access to rank 4, though less often (Aqua Spirit banish Tidal search Stream, normal summon it and xyz - totally legit combo. Bahamut Shark is quite good, in addition)

After a format dominated by Dragons and Prophecy, people may think Mermail is just normal. NO! The use of 6 hand traps in Dragons, as well as Spellbook of Fate and Jowgen, prevented Mermail from going to top. When there's no more Dragon or Prophecy, the trend would be over, and Mermail, being the fastest deck right now, can easily crush everything on its way

BUT, we have had a Mermail format, and Konami rarely does something that boosts the old deck. Six Samurai and Dark World were exceptions, while everything else just kept being hit (Plant, Dino Rabbit, Wind Up, Chaos Dragon,...)

BUT, again, Mermail is not likely to be hit. Why? Why should you hit a deck that does absolutely shit in the recent months? That creates a paradox, hitting the whole 3 meta decks seems stupid, but letting any of them survive is even more stupid

Evilswarm (and, to some extent, Constellar) are the anti-meta picks for the format. I don't see any problems with the 2 decks though. They're doing stuffs in their own way: not too fast, not too aggressive, not too consistent. They're just... good. But still Ophion is bad for the game, obviously

To sum up, I don't think Konami would hit everything. And if they ever hit anything, they wouldn't kill them, just yet. Following Konami's trend of making the banlist really short, I'd PREDICT something like this:

Banned: 
Super Rejuvenation

Limited:
Spellbook of Judgment
Spellbook of Secret
Dracossack

Semi-limited:
Mermail Abyssteus

Unlimited:
Who cares?

Some reasoning:

The banning of Rejuvenation: Because with 3 Swords and 3 Sarcophaguses, Dragons are still consistent as ****. Just don't let them be too broken, and make things a little more... fair. Dragons without Rejuvenation = grind game (it's not easy to OTK with Dragons, especially in game 2-3). Without Rejuvenation, Dragon will be a Mermail-like deck. Lots of card advantages, sometimes pulling off an OTK with a good/god hand, most of the time will be about summoning big monsters (Dracossack or Master of Blades) and protect the field. In short, Dragons don't need Rejuvenation to be a good deck

The limited: Because Konami likes hitting searcher. Secret or Magician is 50:50, but Magician is easier to stop (Effect Veiler, Breakthrough Skill,...) so I'd pick Secret to the limited list. Requiring a normal summon is also a disadvantage for the Blue Magician at times. Judgment is obvious choice: for the whole last format, the first Judgment is just a preparation for a bigger Judgment next turn. Judgment also serves as a stupid way of protection in the Spellbook mirror matchs, so goodbye!

The same thing goes to Dracossack: People don't have too much problem dealing with the first Dracossack, but the second and third are too much to handle. Big Eye is the same, but TCG people don't use Big Eye that much, so I guess hitting 1 of them is enough. Not to mention now me have Master of Blades

The semi-limited Mermail Abyssteus: Because it's what makes Mermail so consistent during the pre-LTGY era. It even replaces the ultimate search engine Genex Undine/Atlantean Dragoons. And if you're still playing Mermail now, you know having Abyssteus makes us feel much better than Abyssmegalo, because the whole point of the Mermail deck in this meta is Abyssgaios. The Megalo/Diva OTK is still broken, but it's much easier to stop (Book of Moon, from my own experience) and requires more cards than a Gaios setup, especially with Sream/Tidal engine

Also, the reason for not hitting any Dragons is: the deck should remain for a little bit more (look at Plant, Wind-Ups,...) and the Dragons also serve in various single-attribute decks (Karakuri, Gadget, Plant (the new one with Tree Spirit coming soon) Dragunity, Mermail, Fire Fist,...). If the Dragons weren't able to summon themselves by banishing Dragons, I'd appreciate Konami for bringing in such balanced elements for single-attribute decks. It sucks we cannot change the text, but I haven't seen anyone putting 2 elements in a deck

There's one last topic to talk about: hand traps. From my experience, Maxx "C" is a really good card design, and so is Effect Veiler. The problem is, the 2 hand traps should never ever have co-existed. There're a number of more balanced hand trap: the limited Gorz, Tragoedia, Swift Scarecrow, Trifortressops. In that case, if people decide to push through Maxx "C", the risk is high, but still not like deciding your game in a coin toss. Have you ever tried to push through Maxx "C", and on your last key move you're hit by Veiler? To stop a combo, people should be required to have more than just a single monster which helps you digging for another single monster. Herald of Orange Light is balanced, so as Trifortressops, Tragoedia, which are easier to play around. However Scarecrow is quite broken too, if you haven't realized

On the other hand, without Maxx "C", everything's alright. You need to conserve your hand traps, read your opponent possible combos, or in short, be more skillful

But we can't do anything to it but to face it. I really don't like the existence of hand traps from the start, but that's another topic that we'll talk about later

So, that concluded my article for today. It's been quite long since I last wrote a real article for this blog, I hope you still appreciated it xD

Until next... format

Peace