A few thoughts

It's been a very long while since I made a blog post, and in all honesty with the game as inert as it is it's very hard to make consistent posts. I've been following Michael Bonacini's initiative and have revisited the April 2005 format.

I've been very impressed with the format to the point where I play it more than I play Advanced. Surprisingly, the demand has been very large and I'm having no difficulty in finding a game. More surprisingly, I've managed to get a decent following for it on Pojo, perhaps suggesting it isn't the completely inane well of idiocy some portray it to be.

With that point raised, I'd like to respond to one of Michael's posts briefly. Link to post here. The content of his post is accurate. I can't disagree with anything he said because in all honesty it's true. What I will say, however, is that his post seems somewhat mis-targeted. From my personal experience, I do find that this sort of player extends far beyond the boundaries of just Pojo; I find them wherever I go, be it YouTube, DuelingNetwork, locals or wherever I venture. Although Pojo does seem to have a disturbing accumulation of these players, especially (if not, exclusively) in the Forbidden/Limited forums, I don't think it's accurate to say that Pojo is the sole culprit of the game devolving as it is.

I'm also becoming increasingly frustrated with Konami. Their motives are so blatantly about pushing product that it's sad. Kevin's F/L list articles are a crude attempt to make the list seem altruistic when in reality it acts solely as a form of pseudo set rotation. This goes for their other articles too. They seem to be more about pushing the card than discussing its relevance and design in an honest and open way. And to no discredit to the authors, some of the articles are very misleading or at least show lack of proper knowledge. When I read the Void Ogre Dragon article suggest that people should be discarding cards in an Infernity deck, part of me died.

On that note, my Chain Infernity variant has been testing flawlessly. It has good match-ups against most of the meta. Dino Rabbit just doesn't have outs to Barrier, Chaos Dragons aren't designed to be able to handle mass back row, Inzektors have a tough time handling the negation and Wind-Ups lose their win condition after I take a turn. If the OCG weren't so busy maining triple Beetle in a redundant attempt to summon VOD on the first turn, they might have noticed how obscene Lavalval Chain was as a brute consistency engine. Running the first turn VOD variant (A.K.A. BVOD) is quite frankly idiotic. The deck can't do what Dino Rabbit does and forfeiting so many plays for a mediocre boss monster that dies to Fiendish Chain/Compulsory Evacuation Device is asking for trouble. It's far better to abuse what Infernity is best at: raw advantage. The BVOD variant just doesn't have a reliable +1 engine to fall back on after their field gets dismantled.

I'll go into a bit more detail about Infernity in an upcoming post. There's an awful lot to talk about.

Goat Control format has been very appealing to me so far. The fact that I can be hit by a first turn full trinity and still win leaves a very nice feeling. The deck is also a lot of fun and the format is unbelievably balanced. It's nice to actually play against my opponent rather than just their deck. I highly recommend trying out the format.

Here's a guide I made on Pojo if you need somewhere to start. Link here. A lot of people don't have accurate access to the F/L list or legality for the format (the Wikia's one is inaccurate), so that thread is pretty good in that regard.

On another note, I'll probably be removing the rating system below. While I've always wanted honest feedback and I do appreciate the good ratings I get, I don't want to have to restrain myself just to appeal to readers. I want to be more honest in my posts and I feel that it's the best way to go about it.

Leave a comment if you want.

~Valafar123