Preparing for Asia Plus - 2

I'm not gonna go stating things like you should play test more, sleep well and have a good proportioned breakfast; although I do feel the majority of Malaysian need these advise, especially the breakfast part. Normally I find everyone I talked to not taken breakfast and are struggling through round 1 for the lunch break. Good thing seeded players start late and we can enjoy lunch with much spare time while the others fight with an empty stomach.

Player B is usually viewed as the dark horse of the team over here. Why is this so? The leader usually plays a META deck and player A plays control more often than not. This leaves B with card pool that basically forces them to play high-risk-high-reward decks. Decks like Lightsworns, Dark Worlds etc are among favorites as they need few staples and rewards the player with their super powerful bosses. Others might prefer strategies like Countdown, Exodia or Chain Burn. In a nutshell, if your deck isn't suited to deal with rogue decks or your not playing these strategies, try to avoid being player B.

Player B is the one who would play over powerful decks and try to score a fast-cheap win against you. They would usually hope that you won't have the necessary side deck cards for their decks. People here usually only side for the really popular and powerful decks. Yes, these top decks need to be taken seriously, but I feel the fact that they are so uber powerful is a trap for the player B's. More likely than not, you would not meet the top tier decks.

Usually, player B will pack cards like Shock Ruler, Prohibition among others to counter these strategies. More often than not, the deck for player B is usually pretty straight forward. Powerful, but straight forward. Hence it is easily sided against. These players can also afford to waste less precious side deck space for the more expensive tier 1 and 2s. This is because Malaysian would rarely put an expensive and competitively proven deck as player B. The majority of the guys here would have their ace be leader, and he will get the more powerful and expensive deck. This is mostly because people here believe in some sort of chivalry where the strongest players should face off in an epic battle to the deaths. I'm not sure why we have this mentality, as I would normally just pit our weakest player with a luck based deck against their best player. If he wins, good; if he doesn't, we would just score off wins from the side.

I feel Dark World would have a strong showing this time around, based on the Singaporean qualifiers and the fact that the deck was once very well celebrated over here. Player B's definitely should pack cards that would deal with them, ie Shadow Imprisoning Mirror and DD Crow. I don't really advise siding deck specific cards for the event (ie Gemini Imps), unless you really have side deck space. Remember, the chances of you hitting a deck specifically is actually very slim.

Also, I feel it is important to post rulings that you might need to your advantage on the various Facebook pages regarding Malaysia YGO and also clarify these with the judging panels. You don't wanna get a game loss because the judges don't know the exact rulings. I've experienced this several times before. Sometimes, judges would scroll their iPad for rulings and this would take time out of the clock; going into time may affect your chance of winning, especially if your not running something OTK based.

Rule sharking and some amount of stacking cannot be avoided in such large scale events. My advise, play every game like your opponent is a cheater. This might sound wrong and all, but that's actually a very safe mind set, as you are prepared for the worst. Do check with the judge and not take what your opponent's words for granted, NO MATTER WHO HE IS.

Again, sorry for the messy post. I've not write in a long time and I'm having problems organizing my post (not that I was writing quality articles before my short break).