Alright, this isn’t actually a match. I usually miss covering a round or two, because at some point eating food becomes necessary. I always feel a bit bad about that missing number in the coverage, though. So . . . here’s my lunch:
You’ll note that while this lunch is representative of the well-established chicken finger archetype, it’s been teched out with a lemon wedge, a basil leaf, and a container of what was described to me as “plum sauce.” Regional tech, apparently.
Chicken fingers were a major player in the lunch metagame, as were hot dogs, hamburgers, and poutine—french fries covered with cheese and gravy. Personally, I think poutine would have been a bad matchup. As for my particular lunch, the chicken fingers were eliminated in under three minutes.
My lunch break also gave me the opportunity to walk around and chat with the players. There are a lot of players at this event with very little competitive experience, and perhaps that’s contributed to the diversity of the metagame. In some ways, it’s simply refreshing to see such a broad array of decks. Hopefully, one of the more rogue-ish builds will make Top 8 today.
I also had a chance to ask the players their opinions on the recent changes to the rules and the banned list (R&D’s explanation of those changes is coming on Monday). Paul Ross was nice enough to print out a description of the three changes and post copies around the venue:
Most people didn’t know about the change regarding how payment powers were modified by replacement effects, and most of the rest didn’t seem to care. One person who did care was Michael Jacob. His deck, and its interaction with the card Threat Neutralized, was probably one of the major reasons for the change. The fact that the Checkmate staple now actually worked as intended against him wasn’t good news.
As for the other changes . . . players were downright confused as to why Antarctic Research Base was banned. R&D will explain on Monday, I’m sure. Finally, regarding Justice League of Arkham, no one seemed to have a problem. In fact, the biggest complaint I heard was that the card wasn’t banned immediately (as it stands now, the bannings go into effect on July 1). There are reasons for that, too . . . check back with Metagame on Monday. All in all, there seems to be much less excitement over this second round of bannings than there was over Overload. A good thing, I think.