Fire Fisting in Vegas

March 19, 2014

Categories: Featured YuGiOh! Articles, YuGiOh!

by Dalton Bousman

Leading up to ARGCS Las Vegas I had a month to decide what to play. As I spoke about in previous articles, I tested several decks, and none of them turned out to be the right choice. I decided to stick with Fire Fists for at least one more event.

My flight was supposed to be at 7pm on Thursday and due to traffic I ended up missing my flight, and having to take the next one. It ended up working out because two of the judges that I am pretty good friends with were also on this flight. When we finally landed and went to get our luggage, mine was nowhere to be found. I had to fill out insurance papers, and worry about where it may be.

The next day they ended up shuttling it over to the hotel, and I don’t have to worry about finding the entire deck to buy or borrow. While I was driving down the strip that night, I was talking with Brad and Jeff about whether or not I should main [ccProd]Full House[/ccProd] again, or if I should play [ccProd]Mind Crush[/ccProd] in place of it. I had already decided on the rest of the deck, this was just the last change. They both concluded that Mind Crush would be a good choice, and this was the only real change to the main deck that I had made since the tournament in North Carolina.

Going into the event I decided I would main deck cards for Water and Fire, leaving the other decks all slightly unprepared for. I figured that if I played against these other decks, I should have an easier time with them because they are not as difficult to beat as Fire and Water.

Round 1- Day one begins and I am paired against a Geargia player. He has no idea that I have an awful reputation for slow play, and starts off by reading every card I play. He was trying to act as if he had never played the game before, but in return was slowing things down immensely. Game one I [ccProd]Pot of Duality[/ccProd] for a Mind Crush, set a few and pass. He doesn’t open armor, and a few turns later when he does set armor, on my turn I draw another Mind Crush. He has had traps for my monsters up until this point. On his turn he flips his [ccProd]Geargiarmor[/ccProd], adding a [ccProd]Geargiaccelerator[/ccProd] to his hand. I flip Mind Crush calling the accelerator, and he chains trap stun. I chain the second Mind Crush, calling the same card again, and he discards two copies to his graveyard. He added the second one, assuming the Trap Stun would be there for the Mind Crush he saw. I notice he instantly goes on tilt and I make a silly comment that was something like, “Its alright you probably have the [ccProd]Call of the Haunted[/ccProd] anyways,” and pointed at a set card. He looks at it for a second, and then flips over a Call of the Haunted, not realizing he was still under Trap Stun. Easy to say after using 2 cards to clear 4 of his cards, this game went pretty easily. I end up winning 2-0 in this match.

Round 2- I sit down at my table and open pretty solid with double Mind Crush. My opponent plays [ccProd]Fire Formation – Tenki[/ccProd], and I am pretty excited that this would be a mirror match. He ends up searching [ccProd]Bujin Yamato[/ccProd], and I Mind Crush this away. I get to see the rest of his hand, and cannot remember what I hit with the other Mind Crush, but this game goes pretty easily. We go to game 2 and I remember him setting 5 back rows and passing turn. I draw and summon [ccProd]Brotherhood of the Fire Fist – Bear[/ccProd] and attack. He lets this attack go through, and I can even begin to figure out what his set cards were. When I set a Fire Formation – Tenki, he [ccProd]Mystical Space Typhoons[/ccProd] it and destroys it. I set three cards and pass my turn. He draws, sets another card and passes back. I attack with Bear again, searching Tenki, this time losing it to a [ccProd]Twister[/ccProd]. I set a [ccProd]Bottomless Trap Hole[/ccProd] and pass back. He tops a Bujingi Hare, and summons it, I respond with Bottomless Trap Hole and it gets placed in the banished pile. He returns play back to me. I draw again, attack with this Bear for a third time, and this time around he lets the attack and effects of Bear go through, along with the searching of Tenki to add a [ccProd]Coach Soldier Wolfbark[/ccProd] to my hand. This is a very weird game, I have 3 dead mind crush sitting face down, while my opponent has 4 set cards that he has still not activated. I end up just beating him down with bear, none of these cards getting activated. He shows me after the game, and they were 2 [ccProd]Needle Ceiling[/ccProd], 1 [ccProd]Bujincarnation[/ccProd], and a [ccProd]Burial from a Different Dimension[/ccProd]. I win once again 2-0.

Round 3 I play against another Geargia player. I get a huge advantage game one, because I can tell by the look on his face, that his hand is not something he wanted to see. He sets four backrow and a monster, and passes. I activate Fire Formation – Tenki search out my Bear, and summon it. The summon of the monster was successful, and when I use the effect to try and blow up his set monster, he uses [ccProd]Breakthrough Skill[/ccProd] to negate the effect. I sit and think for a minute about how this guy could be upset with this hand, or why his face seemed to show this emotion. I wonder if maybe he is trying to psych me out, but then decide that I am not going to over think it. I attack the set monster and it is an Geargiano. I set Mind Crush along with a few other cards. The next turn, on a whim, I flip Mind Crush and Call Mk-2, and he discarded one to the graveyard. This match goes on for a little bit, but I end up taking the win 2-0, third round in a row now.

Round 4 I am paired against Kevin Silva. We are both champions at previous Circuit Series events. We get put on the live stream, and everyone can watch the match on twitch. It was a very good match, went back and forth. I will go out of my way to say that I respect Kevin, he plays very clean and knows what he is doing. A lot of people, who do not know him, speak poorly about him, and I feel like he should be given a chance. Besides that, if you want to see how that game goes, make sure to go watch it. Not to ruin it for anyone, but I win 2-1. He is also the first person I played in swiss so far who goes on to top the event.

Round 5 is the second time I play against someone in Swiss who finishes in the top sixteen. This round, it ends up being the Bujin player who won the entire event, Joseph Chou. I do not remember our match very well, I just know that during one game, I [ccProd]Fiendish Chain[/ccProd] a [ccProd]Bujintei Susanowo[/ccProd] of his, and the next turn make [ccProd]Bujintei Kagutsuchi[/ccProd], and do not attack his monster. I don’t have an out to Bujincarnation, and he has one in grave, and one banished. We pass for a few turns before I get to a Mind Crush and set it. The next turn I call Bujincarnation and end up hitting two of them, giving me an easy win one of the games. The last game we go to time and I win in turns. This is the first time I go to time this weekend, and we both agree either way I would have ended up winning the match so I do not feel bad about it. On a side note he is a really cool guy and I end up following up round after round, hoping he kept winning and could make it into the top cut.

Round 6 I play another person who ends up making it into the top 16 by the end of the day. His name was Anthony Eckroth and he is also best friends with Joseph Chou. We play on the live stream so I will avoid recapping too much of our match because everyone can watch it. The only important thing that came out of this match was getting to meet him. He is an incredibly nice guy, just like Chou from the round before. I take the win, Evilswarms tending to be a relatively easy match up for me, but once again found someone who I was hoping could top the event. I make sure to root for him in the following rounds, and he eventually falls in 16^th place after the last round of Day 1.

Round 7 - Moving into this round, I know that there is a chance I will play against my friend Alex aka Based Loli. We are both x-0 and do end up actually getting paired against one another. We sit down and do a bunch of irrelevant math trying to find out how many x-2’s will top. We end up intentionally tying like we said at the very beginning of the conversation, because we did not want to be the reason the other person did not end up topping. We walk away assuring each other we will win the next round and be in automatically.

Round 8 – This round I get paired against a local player from Nevada. I believe his name was Travis. He was playing Prophecy. I immediately get worried, and have the same thoughts that I had going into the finals of Nashville. This time around it should be even worse, because I decided to side deck 0 copies of [ccProd]Mistake[/ccProd]. I fail to realize that I am main decking 3 Mind Crush and that this could win me the match by itself. There is a written feature on AlteRealityGames.com. I will say that Mind Crush single handedly won me game 1 by discarding 2 [ccProd]High Priestess of Prophecy[/ccProd] at one point in the game, and then 2 [ccProd]Spellbook of Wisdom[/ccProd] at another point. I will also point out now that discarding Wisdom was an awful choice after seeing the [ccProd]Spellbook of the Master[/ccProd] in his hand. I should have discarded the Priestess, knowing that Master would get him life. I asked a question to the judges though, and they assumed I called Wisdom, and so I just went with it and figured I couldn’t lose either way. I win this match and have almost secured my spot in the top 16.

Round 9 - I found my opponent waiting for me at table 2 and gladly intentionally draw with him. I go over to Alex to be sure he is going to make it in as well, and we are both happy that things didn’t go south like they easily could have.

Top 16 - I know I am paired against Alex Reynolds going into Day 2 and I have already studied his deck list. I was most worried about how many cards he had that destroyed multiple cards. 3 [ccProd]Overworked[/ccProd], 2 [ccProd]Mirror Force[/ccProd], 1 [ccProd]Torrential Tribute[/ccProd], and 1 [ccProd]Dark Hole[/ccProd] would all be in his deck for games 2 and 3. Overworked would give me a hard time when trying to make Abyss Dweller the usual way, which would be some sort of path like Bear attack, search out a [ccProd]Fire Formation – Tensu[/ccProd], and then summon a [ccProd]Brotherhood of the Fire Fist – Gorilla[/ccProd], destroy a backrow, and stack into an [ccProd]Abyss Dweller[/ccProd]. Torrential Tribute, Mirror Force, and Dark Hole all scared me as well because I was siding 3 [ccProd]Banisher of the Radiance.[/ccProd] My usual game plan against water was to summon Banisher and to just keep summoning monsters alongside it every turn. This would be much more difficult while playing against all these mass removal spells and traps. Breakthrough Skill and [ccProd]Forbidden Lance[/ccProd] are other cards that made me worry a little, but I had to ignore the bad, and remember how decent of a match up I had verse Water, despite all these cards. I go into the match, win the die roll, and open Forbidden Lance, Fire Formation – Tenki, Mind Crush, Torrential Tribute, [ccProd]Solemn Warning[/ccProd], and Bottomless Trap Hole. I feel so confident at this point because I drew a hand I could not complain about. He summons and [ccProd]Genex Undine[/ccProd] and I Solemn Warning without even questioning it. The next turn I Tenki for Gorilla, swing with Bear, activate Tensu, summon Gorilla, destroy a set Forbidden Lance, and stack for an Abyss Dweller, just like I mentioned above. I felt really secure, and win this game because my draws were really in my favor. Game 2 I open Banisher and summon it into his Solemn Warning. I was not happy with this, but I just work with what I have. I eventually Fiendish Chain an [ccProd]Atlantean Marksman[/ccProd] that was attacking me directly. The following turn I summon Gorilla, and have a read on Mirror Force. I usually would take my read on a card and go with it as if there is no chance I could be wrong. I want to pop the card I perceive to be Mirror Force, but realize if it happens to be a Forbidden Lance or Overworked, I would be in bad shape so I choose to just attack. He ends up flipping that Mirror Force and I Forbidden Lance my Gorilla, and then Forbidden Lance his Atlantean Marksman. I win the battle obviously and get to search out a Fire Formation - Tenki from my deck. I then destroy a backrow with Gorilla, and it is a Forbidden Lance of his. This game seemed to be in my favor from the time he summoned the Marksman, but this situation just sealed the deal. I take the win 2-0 and am moving on to top 8. I would also like to mention that this was the only match I played against water the entire weekend.

Top 8 – After playing my match in top 16, I go over to find out who won the match between Kevin Silva, and Tony Martinez, to see who my opponent will be. After hearing that it was Tony Martinez, I got a bit excited. I would much rather play against Fire Fist, than Hieratics. This will be my only match I play against Fire the whole weekend. On a side note, I was very surprised that I only played 1 match against Water and 1 against Fire, because those are the decks that I assumed would be the most popular choices. Moving on, I lose the die roll, and my opponent opens [ccProd]Cardcar D[/ccProd], Duality, [ccProd]Upstart Goblin[/ccProd], and Fire Formation – Tenki. He sets 3 backrows, and draws his free cards off Cardcar D. I feel like there is no way to win this game, and I somehow pull it out. I have no real memory of this match and don’t really know why. I won't try and to recap this because I simply do not really remember. I end up winning 2-1, and remember respecting my opponent a lot because he didn’t do anything out of line.

Top 4 – This was my final feature match I had. If anyone wants to see what happened you can go watch the match. I lose my first match of the entire weekend to Burial from a Different Dimension. I had to accept the loss for what it was, everyone losses.

This article has got very lengthy, and I was planning on going over why I made the card choices I did and how I side decked against each deck. I will try my best to go over how we decided to side deck and the reason we made certain choices with cards in another article later this week. Lastly, Dirk Wagner was a huge contributor once again, helping with these card choices, and testing things out for me, so I would like to give a giant thank you to him. Hopefully I will see some of you at the YCS in Chicago this weekend, don’t be afraid to come up and say hello! The Circuit Series makes its next stop in Richmond, Virginia on April 26-27! Click the picture below for the details!