At Nationals 2005, Julia Hedberg and I were swarmed by teams looking for coverage. Good players tend to travel in packs, and when you assemble the nation’s best players all in one place, you end up with a ton of teams. They ranged from the focused to the casual, but they all had one thing in common—a desire for their little bit of the spotlight, even if it was just for fifteen minutes.
One of those teams was Team Punishment, a group from the Bay Area of California. I was unable to cover them just because of time constraints; there really aren’t enough hours of the day when you’re a reporter!
Luckily, the team attended SJC Anaheim today; it was a conveniently short trip. Punishment isn’t an established, developed team yet. They’re strictly up-and-coming. But with strong common sense, some good tech, and a closely knit roster of members, they may do well here today.
The team’s leader and spokesman is Mac Chu, a twenty-four-year-old who was running a Tomato Control/Tool Box hybrid. His brother, seventeen-year-old Matthew Chu, was running a similar deck. The team’s last two members present today were Alex Tom and Wilson Yu. Out of the four, the most ambitious deck was played by Wilson Yu, who is also seventeen. It’s a field control deck running one of the day’s more popular tech cards, Zaborg the Thunder Monarch, plus a few other cards that you don’t see in your everyday cookie cutter.
“We were just a bunch of friends playing at this store called Games of Berkeley,” explained Mac. “We met Jae Kim there and started playing there all the time. We made the team for fun, but then we started competing pretty seriously.”
I asked him what he felt his team’s edge was. It’s a pretty point-blank question, but let’s be honest . . . the big teams nowadays run like finely-oiled machines, and a relatively inexperienced group needs to create what advantages they can. He answered right away. “Right now, Wilson’s tech has caught everybody by surprise, with Zaborg the Thunder Monarchs and Bazoo the Soul Eaters. Tomato Control seems to catch people by surprise too—it’s a nonstop flow of tomatoes. People just aren’t used to it.
Wilson Yu had heard the question too, and plopped down in a seat next to Mac. “I scare people!” he chimed in with a smile. Yu himself is nowhere near scary, though his 3-0 win record is. He’ll likely be a star player in the coming months.
Mac went back to answering the question. “Plus, we playtested over and over again. It seems like there’s a set metagame right now. Wilson just decided to do his own thing.”
“Zaborgs are cool and monkeys eat tomatoes.” Wilson smiled again in the sublime way in which only spirit-monkeys and evil tomatoes can make someone smile
I asked them their opinions about the current format. “I don’t like the format currently,” said Chu.
Wilson again piped up. “I’m cool with the format. It’s just that you’ve got to have control in the beginning. If you can control what the opponent is playing, you win.” Chu nodded, seeming to think that this factor was a negative, though Yu liked it.
Despite this disagreement, they both did agree on one thing. “I think we have a good chance today,” said Chu. “Yeah, we’ve got a good chance,” Yu agreed. A healthy dose of confidence was not lacking from either of the duelist’s attitudes.
Thus far, no one from Team Punishment is qualified for the 2006 season of Nationals. It’s par for the course though; last year, the team had one member qualify for Nationals the day before the event was run in a Last Chance Qualifier. With Regionals in California often drawing over 400 people, those four invites don’t go very far. LCQs are often a great opportunity for players who live in competitive metagames to get their invite.
I wondered if the team, which had formed in December, had immediate plans for the future. “We go to everything within driving distance. Our next big event is that SJC at San Mateo. We’re an unsponsored team right now. Like I said, we play at Berkeley Games, but they aren’t official sponsors. We play there and they give us good deals on the stuff we buy there.”
One thing that impressed me about the team was the fact that they recognized the importance of tech in the current environment, which is something that most players miss. Never before has innovation on the single-card level been so important, and as I watched the team discuss Yu’s deck and other innovative cards (Twin-Headed Behemoth came up in discussions all across Saturday), I observed a keen sense of the environment.
If Team Punishment is to grow and succeed, it will likely be because of their understanding of the game. Great minds like Anthony Alvarado, Dale Bellido, and Wilson Luc form extensive models of the environment as they perceive it, and it helps them perform in every factor of the game from deckbuilding to side decking. Team Punishment might cultivate that same edge and will definitely be a force if they succeed.
For now, keep your eye on Wilson Yu. He’s a strong bid for making the Top 8 here today.