Article 53: Stein got Stein'ed

I thought when I wrote the 2006 recap article on 12/17/2006, that's it for the game in 2006. I guess not....

Stein ban:
One day, when I'm just bore and went onto Pojo to look at their WoW TCG forum (just for extra idea on what people are actually using), too bad at the top of the forum, in the Yu-Gi-Oh section, the latest post titled "Stein is banned".

Of course, I thought it's a hoax since people are bore enough to make that kind of title on Pojo General Discussion forum and rant on "that card is fxxking broken". No it's not...it's the real thing.


Of course, our favorite Mr. Tewart kind of "explain" (which is not much explaination, more of stating the obvious) why the card is banned in TCG. We all know why: the card is the "lucksake winning condition", it don't take any skills for a person to use the card...one just draw/search for it, and bam, it's game one. Even 50% of the side deck is DEDICATED to go against the card...when something of that magnitude happened, the card should be ban.

Why I'm talking about an old subject then? Well, just to give my comment on it in my article (even if I had said my point in various forum posts). The ban is fine, people can whine about losing their beloved toy all they want. But that's because those people cannot find a way to accept that the game would be better with the ban, and they think that their money were wasted (too bad...no one tells you to buy overpriced singles) or purely think they cannot win without the card. I don't know, I found myself NEVER even put in a Stein in any of my deck, and I can win games...

So why this card is only banned in TCG? Well, one is the number of available decks in OCG is way higher than TCG, and most of them would do fine (or even better) without Stein. Also, Gorz is in the game, so people fear the damages done to opponent would come back to haunt them. The only 2 decks that would consider Stein is either Chain Burn (mostly in Side Deck) and Necrofranken (since [Soul Absorption] gave you a LOT of life), and both decks are not Tier 1 right now. It's a big different story in TCG. Stein is used in virtually every type of deck, games often comes down to "who get Stein out first", and second turn kill happened a lot, and that's bad for the health of the game. So for the sake of the criticism of the ban...think about the long term of the game, any card that makes the game "un-fun" should be gone.

Since I'm on the subject, let's talk about my latest wish on my axing list...of course, this list does not include FOTB cards (as they're not released yet), nor I would care much about the TCG metagame.

New Ban:
Magician of Faith: I would say this - if a lot of cards is axed simply because of this card, why not just get this card out of the way so other cards can be used?
Cyber Stein: It's not as much a problem in OCG as in the TCG meta, it's still a problem. This card is too lucksake, and it's time for it to rest the gears for 6 months.
Angel's Gift: Dark World is purely WILD with this card.
Destruction Ring: Because I have NO IDEA why this card is unrestricted...

New Restrict:
TIV: Some card needs to control Aggro. Oh yeah, TIV raped Gadgets.
Tsukuyomi: The card is only good with 3x Faith and 3x TER. Now the the combo is limited, it's time for it to go back to one.
Pot of Greed: I ban Gifts, the game need a draw back.
Dagger of Butterflies - Eruma: Because it's a freaking 3 cards combo...
E-Hero Airman: This card is not broken, it's just used wrongly. People are purely putting 3x Airman in their deck because it search each other...then it actually have a secondary effect.

Semi:
Ceasefire: Not much people used this card anymore...outside of Chain Burn, but Chain Burn is not THAT good.
Green Baboon: Limited to 1 is overkill

Out:
Power of Unity/Power of Magician: Equipment Magics are not as good as it used to be...no matter how much this two cards boost a monsters, it's not hard to REMOVE a monster anymore.
Metamorphosis: No need...the biggest combo in TER is gone, and all other combos are balanced (Baltar, etc.)
Rich Goblin: Because...this card is 1 for 1.
Apprentice Magician: No Magician of Faith, no need for semi-restriction

Deck Testing:
Not that I'm in deck building mode...but I'm purely bore and cookie-cut some ideas from various Japanese blogs. Here're some...

1. LnDD: I found that the Japanese HAVE to find a way to make this card useful. The card is pretty much the "hardest to use card" right now in the game, since you will have to adjust everything you do once LnDD hits the field. From the variants I test...none of them work so well...just too much conflict on the Engine this card used (Apprentice, Spy, Frog, Dandy)
2. Dark Chaos: No...not Chaos Sorceror. The latest is Chaos Necromancer. Don't ask me for decklist...I still have no idea why the deck need to use Dark World monsters (and it done pretty well in a Taikai CS tournament...)
3. MPRT: Avarice and MoF restricted? So what? Reincarnation is the latest "tech". Basically, the idea of the deck is recycle Avarice and one of the recruiters (or Reincarnation itself) over and over again, giving no respect to the restriction.

Of course, those are just small faction of number of decks available...and maybe that's why using blogs as the main avenue of communicating is better than having a lot of big forums where 70% of the member shoots down anything "new".

Other stuff:
As one notice, I changed the layout of the main page. If you ask me why, well, I always think the main page is kind of unorganized, and with the new "layout" that is not new, I find the main page kind of easier to navigate.

Of course, the whole concept of the front page right now is from WoTC's magicthegathering.com homepage. The difference between the "professional" one by WoTC and the "amateur" one by me? Well, one is I don't know how to problem with PHP...I wish I do to integrate some forum features to the main page...I just don't know how to do it.

At last, the site had gone WAY over 1 million (1.3 million) hits right now. I want to thank all people that visited the site, no matter what their intention is (most of them just want to look at the "rumors", some love to copy and paste my translation and gives no credit, some to read the card reviews). One thing I will promise, however, is that the site will be active as long as the game is going. There may not be as much content in the coming 4 months (school year) as it's in holiday (where I have time to update the site), but even if the set would go parallel release (doubt it would happened, however), I will still do the Japanese translations. Card Reviews? you bet it...that's my favorite part on the site.

- Baron, 1/10/2007

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