The 2011-2012 season has officially begun, and despite not playing personally, I am still excited to see it. Nintendo seems to have decided to celebrate my retirement by implementing most of the changes I’ve wanted to see for years now, in an ironic sort of “better for the game’s future” slap in the face goodbye. I’m not actually bitter, I’m just joking, and am really glad to see the changes.
Every year now it seems as if Organized Play has made strides for the better, and this is just another step in a long journey towards Pokemon’s continued success. Let me break down my feelings just a little bit now, since I didn’t really go into much depth about my opinions in my previous articles, even though the “news” has been public for nearly a month now.
Championship Points
The lack of a “downside” to losing games over the course of an event is really quite big. In a game such as Pokemon, which not only has a high degree of luck due to typing, prizes, coin flips, who goes first, and a number of other factors, a player can lose a game undeservingly quite easily. As addressed before, the Elo system was designed to be used in games where luck is an almost non factor. Pokemon is not that game.
The Elo system was effectively removed from Magic’s organized play as well, now to be replaced with “Planeswalker Points,” effectively mirroring Pokemon’s efforts to reduce the downside of losing games, which in turn, negatively hurts attendance at events, something they do not like.
For once, what benefits us as players, also benefits Nintendo as a business.To make the variance even worse, unlike Magic, we do not have matchplay for Swiss. They do, and they STILL ruled that the Elo system was not efficient for encouraging a fun and healthy tournament experience.
I think that alone is proof that Pokemon made the right decision in handling this how they did. I’m not saying that the system is even close to perfect, but it is definitely an improvement which I hope will be ironed out more and more as the years progress to give us the best solution possible.
Sure, the current system basically requires you to hit up a large number of events, but to be honest, so did the previous one. The downside here is that events such as States and Regionals actually hold LESS importance than they did previously. Before, a player could come in, win States, do well at Regionals, and do well at Nats and make Worlds.
Now, you have to rack up some wins at Cities and even maybe some Battle Roads to compensate. We don’t have a ton of info yet on the full invite structure outside of a vague explanation, but I would like to see them revert back to giving out Worlds invites for the top 2 of Regionals, for example.
Jay's Backyard
Maybe cut into the overall “rating” depth and give spots to those tournaments, especially due to the size of many of them. Sure, it may give players who live in the middle of nowhere (JAY!) an easy invite, but let’s be honest, Hornung gets his invite every year anyways.
I think we will continue to have at least some degree of issue until they realize that, with the current player base, 128 players is simply NOT ENOUGH to invite per age group to Worlds. When you have very strong players, and former World Champions (or in some players cases, two time World Champions) have successful runs and maintain a strong rating all season long and still not make it into Worlds, the cut off is simply too low.
Nintendo doesn’t even PAY for many trips anymore, so it isn’t like the event is suddenly going to cost them far more to put on. The overall attendance will remain about the same, as 90% of the extra invites likely stem from players who try to grind in anyways, and are already there!
I’m sure the hotels which Nintendo books through will appreciate this as well: More players book rooms in advance with their invites. The player base certainly will enjoy it. Logistically, they did it before in 2004, and in the following few years. If it isn’t an issue logistically, and it isn’t an issue financially, what is stopping them from doing it?
As someone who has qualified for every Worlds before, and not having any reason to be “sour” about the current structure, I still feel like it is not appropriate based on the current tournament player base. Due to the fact that the ratings reset EVERY YEAR, and there are a select number of tournaments per year which yield ways to qualify, there is a large degree of fluctuation. The sample size of events is not large enough to justify such a tight cut off. Hopefully, this changes in the future, as I’m sure everyone would be appreciative of it.
Battle Roads
With that out of the way, let’s look at Battle Roads! I got the opportunity to judge one the first week, and I can give a general outlook as to what was played at the event. The top 4 at the North Olmsted, Ohio Battle Roads was:
1st: Evan Baker, Mew Yanmega Cinccino
2nd: Stephen McGaffney, Gothitelle
3rd: Vileplume Mew Yanmega
4th: Reshiphlosion
The rest of the field was actually really diverse. I think a lot of players are not entirely sure what to use, but I saw at least 3 Gothitelle, a good chunk of Reshiphlosion, 2 Emboar Magnezone, a lot of mew toolbox decks, a few Vileplume decks, 3-4 ZPS builds, some Samurott Donphan, and some Yanmega Magnezone.
Pretty much every archetype was represented, and none of them seemed disproportionate. I wish I could say that I discovered a lot about what this format will boil down into by the decks which showed up and won this event, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
That being said, I’ve done some of my own testing (although not as much as I would like, simply because the motherboard on my “good” computer is fried, and my other ones can’t run PTCGO because the Flash overwhelms it quickly) and what I have found is that Mew Prime, as I touched on previously, appears to be an all-star in this format thus far.
