Spikes & Baron Duel Monster Comet - The #1 Yu-Gi-Oh OCG Site and Community

Article 61: High Five

Happy Halloween, everybody! Hope the ghost and witches does not sacre you and you guys are having fun yet safe trick-or-treating.

No, that's not the most important things to me as I grow up and not care about Halloween as much as I used to anymore. Yesterday marked the 5th birthday of the site. WOW, you may say. I am amazed that I actually have a website that someone actually read and look at!

What me (and Ion) had been up to?
As you see, I am not as active updating the site as I used to. Well, as expected from a college student, they are kind of busy (or they pretend to be). No, it's not like I'm busy with works everyday, but as like all people that went to college knows...

1. Third year classes are HARD
2. The professors just love, I mean LOVE to put all the due dates on the same week, all the tests/exams/quizzes (whatever they like to call it) in the same week. In other words, no DMComet time
3. Sometimes the work are so freaking boring that although they pretend to be busy, they are actually not working and having fun (cough cough those people that consume million cans of cheap beer everyday of a weekend, think of any and every kind of excuse to party, etc.)

So, in other words, I'm more busy and more lazy than I used to...

Plan with the site
As I said in I forgot which article, I'm in the process of updating the front page and most of the sub-pages in the site. The main page now looks outdated, boring, and terrible...so it's time to change it up.

So what's the problem with something I promised 3 months ago and STILL not finished? For those who own a web page, you would think that you are very satisfy with your page. If you start to think it suck, you want a complete overhaul. When you want a complete overhaul, you find yourself completely overwhelm with the number of things you need to do...and for one-person page designer like me (since Ion does nothing but translations...), it's kind of hard to think of ideas to improve your page, and think of a whole new organization.

Other plans? I always want to intergrate the main site with the forum. Of course, the problem is I'm a PHP idiot (so for those people that are having log-in problems and things, I have NO idea how to solve it) and I'm not planning to take class in that either (at least for now...).

Let's talk about the metagame
It's been 2 months since the last ban/restriction list. For TCG...just read other site as I don't really follow the metagame (even I know that Perfect Circle Monarch is THE deck, and recent rise of Zombie is not surprise as it was doing pretty well in Japan, plus some random deck that always get lucky and do well in big tournaments).

For Japanese metagame, of course, for Frontier Cups, we all know that Destiny Light-Dark is dominating that tournament. There are also some Good Stuff (a.k.a. "Standard" deck), Emperor is doing OK as there exist a lot of them. There is also the stupid Ocean Beat (basically standard beatdown deck using interaction of Ocean and Airman) and any sort of deck you can think of...

Of course, as expected from my prediction, as long as Frog is in the game, there is no reason not to use Emperor. If just looking at Frontier Cup, they always have people that use the "hot card at the moment", or, the card choice depends on whether they want to test out a new card in existing decks. For whatever reason, Turbo Pot is not looked at...(OK, I will kind of explain it as that it's either forgotten, or that the deck is nowhere as good with all the new cards)

But for once, the prediction from the ban list article is correct...WOW!

The card quality...
One reason that it's hard to update the site right now, especially card reviews, is the lack of quality cards that is NOT limited to a theme. In recent set, Konami wants to push out a bunch of monster series each with it's specialize mechanics. The result is kind of mixed...they are fun to use for 2 weeks after the set is release, but afterward, they get boring and stupid as they are not THAT good.

As usual, the promo card qualities are crazy. Although I don't really like that (as they should be balance...), it may be a good way for Konami to sell products...oh well...

Although recently Konami increases the set size from 60 to 80, I would say it's kind of little too late and they still got no clue how to make a set. Here's my few cents on how a set should be like...

1. Fix up the anime theme cards: While some anime theme are good in the anime, in reality, they suck. So many of the anime theme required the "correct draw" to even have a chance to start doing anything, and it does not help when, outside of Judai, all Konami does is release the 10 or so cards for that character and not much else...Also, STOP not changing the text of some cards, since some of them are limited in usage in a RIDICULOUS way.
2. Stop being redundant: While there is a new theme each set, however, the sad thing is all of them have not much identity except how they do the same thing. Well, the game itself is a problem: there is only SO much one can do...but there is also a Aggro-Control-Combo. Although Lorwyn does a bad job assigning the tribes into each, it does not mean that Konami cannot make some card theme more control-ish, some required more combo-ish, etc.
3. Support old themes: Theme should not be one-and-done. It does not mean some theme should be support every set as too much card is bad (see E-Heroes), but few every 2 or 3 sets should keep an old theme refreshing.

Now I would eat my cake...XD (Nope, I don't have one...sad)

- Baron, 10/31/2007