Life on the Bubble: A Standard Retrospective

The online standard tournament on December 5th was the only Jasco-hosted standard event of 2020 since worlds in February, so people put down their money to compete for some pretty real prizes. That, and there were some people who  entered to screw around with a deck idea and then miss tops by a mile and a half, but whatever floats your boat is fine with me, haha. I entered with a Rando deck that I had come up with earlier that week, and I wish that I had come to a deck choice much earlier because this deck was, in practice, clearly untested. Here is the link to the deck I ran, with the differences being that the 4x Azwel’s Little Doll in the deck is 4x Search for Salvation and the 2x Ominous Prophecy in the sideboard is 2x Royal Bodyguard, which I would have been much happier mainboarding. I ended up placing 11th overall, with a record of 4-2 putting me on the bubble to top cuts, but falling out of top cuts due to my terrible tiebreakers.

There were some things that I learned through this event, one of which is to respect peoples’ different delivery methods for attacks. I’ve been playing this game for almost half my life at this point, and I’ve seen so many different delivery methods over the year come and go, and I’ve got to admit that it’s skewed my perception on things. There were years where the Void symbol was on top of its game, and it had such clear ways to strip away your hand. Instead of the random discard that it has these days, you would just look at their hand and take away any blocks that are relevant to your attacks. Living through that has somewhat made me not respect the discard abilities on cards these days, even with Queen of Hearts being nearly a reprint of Shadow Banishment! I’ve found that I don’t respect discard decks (or honestly, most decks) and that I will just play out all the cards in my hand instead of holding a block for their turn, because it would just get discarded anyway! This is obviously not the best plan, but if you have a 30 health pool to hide behind, it’s not terrible. 

On the other hand, I learned to absolutely respect speed much more than I have for years. There used to be a 1 difficulty foundation that could pump your attack’s speed by 6 or 8 at a time, which is obviously ridiculous, but I still haven’t respected speed pump since probably 2009. On that note, I don’t think I’ve played a character that actively gives speed bonuses in years, aside from characters who give speed & damage, like Lilith2 and Rando here. If you’ve got the momentum to support it, Rando’s speed & damage pump can get pretty high up there, and I really got to experience the trouble people had blocking multiple 7+ speed attacks across a turn, so it really got me thinking about taking my deck building in a different direction for a while. 

At the Canadian weeklies the day after the event, I ran Chun-Li2, arguably the worst character out of SFvDS, but since the characters in that set are insanely strong, that’s like saying that she is the worst Beatle. In the end, she still gets to be Ringo Starr. (Who, just like Chun-Li in the SFvDS set, has outlived her friends who shined brighter than her) She proved to be a lot better than I remembered her being +3 speed to all of your attacks is nothing to scoff at, and can accidentally steal some turn 2 wins because your opponent simply can’t block anything. I’m going to focus on building speed pump characters for a little while now, so I hope that people mourn their cycled Balanced Fighters and pray for their Uniting the Cosmos to hit at the right time.

Another discovery I made in the week leading up to the event is that it is not as easy to make an attack base on the All symbol as it was before. Losing the beast that was Shadow Slicer was a significant slap to All, and its slot in decks is wavering for a lot of people. It was a powerhouse 4 difficulty to help throw the kill out, even without its ability to pick up more copies of itself. An All attack lineup generally starts the same, with Scarlet Meteor & Nut Kracker, and then some cards from your character’s support, and then you hope that you don’t have many more rooms because that’s about it. I had a lot of trouble filling the last few slots of my deck, which is why my attack lineup has random amounts of Yamato Slam, Fatality, Meifa’s Assault, and Ghost Thief Funeral thrown in after I had my essential attacks. Looking back, I absolutely should have run Rando's Spirit Gun, because I overly relied on Rando’s form ability to steal me viable attacks in every single match. On a side note, I would like to thank 4 of my 5 opponents who ran attacks for running Scarlet Meteor, as it just gave me extra copies of True Identity. Much Love, friends. And to my 6th opponent, Bo Tucker, who did not run attacks, Rando does not like you.

In conclusion, it isn’t so bad to miss out on top cuts, and maybe it isn’t so bad to even do poorly in an event overall, as long as you are learning and progressing yourself as a player, it can’t be that bad!