yeh i totally agree with omar players should have more toleration for the judges and if a player chooses not to appeal then that is totally the players fault.

ps boo! omar booo! jk

-henry

Anyone hear about the Shadowpact deck killing ahemds on 3?

I remember the days when judges acted professionally on message boards.

:(

Wasn't there, can't comment on events, not sure how I would have acted were I in either the player's shoes or the judge's shoes... but who cares what ethnicity the guy was?

One way or another, judging is a thankless job (I ran heroclix tournaments for two and a half years), and judges tend to do the best they can under whatever conditions they're working at - yet they're still human. If you're not willing to accept the judge's call, if you suspect the call is incorrect, appeal it.

Amen, brother.

I would also like to applaud Paul for his class and maturity in this situation. Very well done.

Now, the rest of you, chill out and download some Norah. You'll be glad you did.

So it's over
i'm sorry for all of you who couldn't attend
much fun was had, and everything went pretty smoothly
Kree/VU didn't do as well for me on Day one as I thought it would(stupid resource hate and Anne-Marie Cotez negating my live Kree or Dies)
and I had Patrick on the ropes with Devil Slayer combo round 1 of day 2...if I only had a brain I would've one (oh and rtfc)
Stu was right for once lol, Brian Top 8'd so it was cool to see at least one person from our group do well
Bizzaro was dominant, and Steel Girder is freaking rediculous in the mirror
Congrats to Patrick, and whoever ended up winning the modern age event
Long Live Vs.!

I understand how good steel girder can be in the mirror but what is the turn 5 play for the girder.

Another Bizarro + Girder.

Most of the other Bizarro decks had other 5-drops like Abe Sapien, Talia, Lex Luthor, etc. Our version dropped Bizarro every turn from turn 4 on, and if you think about it, Bizarro is still an 11 ATK turn 5 play, which is still higher than a normal 5-drop, so equipping a Girder just adds to it.

My deck had a variety of options on 5: Bizarro, Bizarro + Boris, Talia discarding Black Thorn or Boris to get them into play for free, Red Shift. All of those were good, but Steel Girder was a great call by Patrick's group, and it was one of several reasons why I lost to Joe in the mirror. If I do an updated build, that's definitely one of the ideas from theirs that I'm going to incorporate. They were much better prepared for the mirror than I was.

I was really happy with my deck and how it performed (up until its thermal meltdown against Patrick in the top 8 :( ), but theirs was definitely the better deck overall. Hat's off to Patrick and Joe, and also to Ludin, who convinced Patrick to play SteelGirder.

P.S. That Abe Sapien thing is not very good. It is a poor plan to try to outpump an aggro deck on 5 with +2/+2 power-ups when your starting DEF is 7. Especially in the mirror, where you can be facing a Bizarro with Juggernaut's Helmet, Doomstadt, and Adamantium Claws (11+5+3+4=23 ATK). When defending, you want to nuke the attack entirely with Force Field Projection, and when attacking you want to use Healing Factor or Follow the Leader to keep your Bizarro.

P.P.S. to Tommy Ashton and anyone else who thinks/thought that the Bizarro deck is just a glorified Checkmate/VU deck. In round 1 I played against a Syndicate rush deck. He got me down to 7 on turn 4, and he was at 28. He had a huge field and thought he had the game won. When I finished my attacks on 5, he was at -69. Nuff said.

This whole judge issue is getting a bit out of hand.

Please realize that emotions run high for both players and judges at these events and the stresses of a long day makes it hard on everyone.

As for my judges being professional... *during* events, I feel they are very professional as we stress that in our pre-event meetings and our post-event meetings. Afterwards, they go back to being normal people and sometimes they feel slighted by comments made here and use the power of the InterWebs to respond.

Although there was some good intent, TDK's post may be a little harsh but understand he's a hard working judge and was very irritated by the behavior of some players over this past 2 days. He was the only judge who worked the ENTIRE two days (16 hours Saturday, 12 hours Sunday) and was the first to volunteer his help even though he had not been involved in VS for almost a year since the MTU release.

What he meant is that players/bystanders/spectators/press should not involve themselves in a ruling that is being made unless they are being asked to. It just adds more confusion to the matter. Of course, if they see something out of place, it is their responsibility to notify a tourney official but this is not what happened during this incident.

That being said... Omar... let me handle these InterWeb wars... too many things can be misconstrued in cyberspace.

I want to apologize for my words about the judge, I wasn't there and I did not know what goes into being a judge at an event of any caliber. Working 28 hours on any job will kill you, I work as a claims adjuster and I would kill myself after a 16 hour shift let alone doing it again the next day. I also was not aware that you are able to appeal calls. I guess I was more upset that it was good friend who had the bad call, but if he didn't get upset I shouldn't either.

Considering TCGs in general are mostly about answers this is where Bizarro is beyond good. Any Bizarro deck has a huge portion of the card pool to get answers for anything. Whats even more rediculous is that the deck can go and get multiple answers a turn without even costing cards in hand. If you don't need answers with Bizzaro, you get greedy and just overpower your opponent with power cards for the win. The deck is totally unfun to prepare and play against. Its relegated SA for me to the same tier of unfun as GA. I like to feel partially thematic and SA is in the same tier as GA in that the decks are random unthematic piles of power cards that synergize.

You simply have to build to beat Bizarro or tech your Bizarro to beat the other Bizarro tech. It comes purely down to whos 1 or 2 of tech is better from the Bizzaro deck. Which to me is mostly unfun. Until they errata Four Freedoms Plaza to work as it was originally designed with 4 characters and not 1,(The card was worded way before they thought they would randomly implement a character that had all names) I probably won't play a non-kitchen table game of SA again for a long time. Not even legacy MTG decks have that kind of searching.

I played against that deck it was pretty much just Conjure out a June Moon on three.

I also agree that they went overboard on the new Bizarro World too. I talked with Erick about it and he felt that - and I agree with this - they probably should've made it so that he only has the names of DC characters.

The deck is fun right now because it's new, but I think once the novelty will wears off people will see just unfriendly it is. This deck is the most 'Ahmedest' of Ahmed decks if that makes sense.

Teching to beat Bizarro is pretty tough too. With the possibility of playing up to eight negation and Poseidonis, resource ####ing isn't a sure-fire thing. The most definitive way is to hide Ronan, but then the game becomes an issue of who won the die roll. Or you can play IHSS and hope you draw 'the Juice'.

I don't know though; I'm sure the metagame will adjust to some degree. I guess some people would say that you're missing the point if you're complaining and Bizarro World being too good.

I really think that a big part of the deck's success on Saturday is due to the fact that most people didn't know what they were up against. The deck lists I saw posted before the tournament were very different than the ones that Patrick, Joe, and I were playing (I never saw Brian Gates's). Many of the most important cards in our decks were completely missing in the builds posted earlier, and consequently many people were not prepared for them (although you were not one of them, Paul, damn you!). The deck will continue to be very good because it's extremely powerful and very consistent, but it has weaknesses that can and will be exploited, and I think the metagame will largely adapt to meet the challenge.