The following are words I have to say about "Team League: Round #1 @ Nightwing’s Gaming Loft", a ranked tournament using Team Burst Standard 3v3 format.
I recommend the following music for reading the report. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C86zGcA6Tw8 . Look, I play a lot of good videogames, don't judge me.
- We had 11 teams of 3 people, totalling 33 people. It was most people's first exposure to team format, myself included.
- One blader left early, their team needed to make a non-participant substitution for a match, just to keep things going.
- The weather was hot. The building is loud when enough bladers are present, and it gets a little chaotic in there.
- The tournament began around 11:45, and ended around 4. We intended to start around 11, but it turns out that seeding for a team tournament is a nightmare. For one thing, it's not covered in the rules, at all. We ended up averaging the beyrank of every team and going by that, and that took quite a bit of time. And then we had some struggles getting the round robin groups to appear in Challonge. Always some infrastructural issues to deal with.
- We were new to Team format, and surprised by a LOT of the changes. In Team Format, between 7-12 teams is group round robin, there's no deck format finals, and only the top team in each group goes to the finals. Also teams are allowed to give advice and coaching to their active blader during matches because the team is considered one entity. Lotta surprises today.
- The team I was on was LJ-Blader's. He was the team captain, since he was managing decks for both himself and MamaBey2122. I was also on this team. I would say we were a solid, effective team. LJ made some suggestions to my deck before we started, I was going to run Prominence on Over instead of Nexus+S. His suggestion was objectively correct. We all did very well today. LJ's a great blader as always, MamaBey is also quite good and although she doesn't have an extremely powerful launch she often makes combos win that probably shouldn't, and yet they do. And I? Well, I would say I do a decent job blading most of the time.
- That's why seeding was so important, we needed to make sure that the two groups were more or less balanced. We had a mooore or less similar number of evenly competitive teams in each bracket. Group A contained the unstoppable powerhouse of CrisisCrusher07, geetster99, and robert_loller. The first seeded team in group B was LJ-Blader's. Below that in group A we had an extremely powerful team of Mike.Nightwing, JCMakeEmBurst, and maxrod. A whole bunch of competitive bladers came up from down south as well, and were in group B. Beyond that there were a few other teams, including one with Allen Schaffer, who is quite good, some famiilar faces, some newer bladers, and some surprise upsets.
- I considered the possibility that a team name would be required. I had one in the back of my mind. When we registered, and they asked us for the team name, LJ paused. We hadn't discussed it. He looked at me. I was fully masked, so I don't think he saw the chaotic grin that crept over my face. I suggested the name. He agreed to it. You can see the team name in the image below.
![[Image: nowsonic.png]](https://i.ibb.co/tmdq0Zy/nowsonic.png)
- I bring a certain chaotic energy to tournaments; at one point I walked up to some people I knew and began doing the floss dance, mostly incorrectly. Expect the unexpected, bladers!
- One thing we should note about the tournament is that Nightwing announced we would not be relying on our phones for recording matches and judging from that. We would use our eyes. This resulted in fewer ties overall, honestly. The change in the spin rules mostly did away with some of the ties, and a lot of the matches were just way easier to call with no phones. Oh, it stressed us out a LOT because there were a lot of close ones, and I really WANTED to record a lot of the matches. But we didn't. There were a couple KO matches I would've loved to record, just to be certain, especially when the timing on a double KO is involved. I only had bladers vocally disagree with my rulings twice, but at that point with no recordings it's honestly your claim against the judge, and the judges are less biased, so, there's not much to be done there. There was One battle I feel a judge called wrong that I was involved in, but I kept it to myself. What the judge says goes. In the future, I really think we ought to be recording as normal, although the 4 hour tournament would take even longer.
- Judging for a team tournament is kind of a nightmare. You have to keep a tally of every single point in all 3 of a team's matches, and the winner is chosen based on the total points per team. I did not once see a tiebreak needed. There was also a rule in place that judges had to be from the opposite group, so given our good attention to detail, LJ and I wound up doing most of the judging for the Group A matches. This occasionally led to some issues in that we couldn't have our matches because both of us were busy. There were several times where we just put LJ last in the order for our team's matches because he was actively judging some Group A matches.
- Originally there were 4 beystadiums set up for the matches, but it just wasn't happening. We didn't have enough judges for the Group A matches, so it got cut down to 3 beystadiums, and eventually 2. We really need more judges next time across both groups, but we had issues with the local experienced judges being mostly in Group A. A little chaotic, but, eh. That's life!
- My deck for today was Vanish Bahamut Tapered Bearing'-10, Prominence Belial2 Nexus+S Morbius-6, and good ol Dynamite+F Perseus Giga Drift-0. Some of you may remember that I'd really soured on Prominence after my last couple of tournaments, but I decided "It's Probably Okay". It did very well today, surprisingly. It knocked out a while bunch of right spin and left spin, which is just bonkers to me. It defends against Guilty and has good opposite spin. And for some reason it did okay against its weakness, same spin stamina. Vanish did good work as always, even defending against Guilty and outmatching a lot of other stuff on left. And Dynamite. What's to say about my Dynamite? It has one weakness, Dynamite on Bearing, and I played the odds, and I didn't encounter it all day, so, it did really really well. It was... excessively good and powerful.
- I was loathe to try HXt+' again today, it had done so poorly for me in recent events. But I saw a lot of it today for other people and it did really well. Maybe it's just mine. I feel like it tips over way too easily, but on B-09s it is halfway decent. LJ was using it just fine. I can't remember if it was in his deck or MamaBey's. I suspect they will tell us. I still intend to avoid this driver for the most part, it has disappointed me too often.
- I never ended up changing my deck once the whole time. Sure, I shifted the order, but I never changed it. Like Eleanor Shellstrop would say, DC, "ya basic!". I feel like in 3v3 you can get away with being basic, there's no guarantee that a counter will hit correctly.
- Let's talk about bagels. It was my birthday recently. Happy 39th, DC, you're almost 40! It terrifies you. The nightmares keep getting worse. Anyway, my mother sent me some bagels in the mail, from NYC. She did not properly understand the quantity of bagels she was sending. I wound up with 48 bagels. They're good bagels, yes, but that is too many bagels! I elected to bring half to the tournament today; 22 of the 24 were consumed. Someone thankfully took the 2 remaining poppyseed bagels before they could get stuck in my teeth. I witnessed two people eating the bagels unsliced, without any cream cheese or other condiment. While I may find it personally strange, you are allowed to eat the bagels how you wish. They're good bagels, bladers!
- LJ's team did exceedingly well. Because of the way the seeding was set up, I admit that Group A was a harder set of opponents overall. With odd numbers of teams, it usually works out that way. MamaBey generally had closer matched, 2-3 or 3-2. LJ blader hit it out of the park as usual, mostly. I was sort of all over the place between 3-0 and 3-2.
- Our crucial first stage match was against "Help Me Help Us", a group of bladers who traveled a great distance to be there! They included Kirito1696 (I think?), some blader whose name I didn't quite catch but was also good, and the unfathomable ---. This was an important match for us; it appeared that whichever team won this match was going to sweep first stage in Group B, and be the only team to go to the final match. I was batting cleanup for this one. In earlier matches we'd normally stuck with the order of MamaBey, me, and then LJ. And I think our opponents were counting on that. But we switched it up, and I think that time it went LJ, MamaBey, and me. Maybe reverse the order of the first two. Anyway, It was Close going into the final match. I don't remember if it was tied or what, I think it might've been 3-2 and 2-3. And then it was me against ---. If you want to hear the music that was going through my head, it's at the top of this tournament report. I was successful, and we locked up our spot in the finals.
- We went 4-0 in Group B, so we made it to the finals. Crisis and Geetster's team The Beyblade Experience made it 5-0. I have a notoriously bad track record against Crisis in the finals of these events, so for blader order we just... shuffled the cards and see what we got. Thankfully, I didn't have to face Crisis. I did however have to battle robert_loller in the middle. What can I say? He's from out of town but he's good. He got me 1-2. He mode changed into high mode for one of the opposite spin matches, and I honestly thought it could still go either way, so I stayed in low, but he got that point. MamaBey had done better against Geetster, keeping him to 2-3, recovering some points after what looked like it might be an early sweep. But by the time LJ had to fight Crisis, we were down 3-6 and we were mostly toast. LJ would've needed to point, point, and then burst to win 4-0. Unfortunately, didn't happen; I think Crisis beat him too. Still very good matches all around!
- Our team got second place! Crisis and robert and Geetster got 1st... honestly, surprising no one. What can I say? They're good. :D
- Finals in Team format don't use deck format, just a regular team battle. You know what? Good. I'm sick of deck format.
- I think Team format is interesting, especially on 3v3. A little time consuming, but good. I'm looking forward to more of these events. Especially since being on a 2nd place team means we get an invite to the invitationals if he decides to do a tournament like that at the end of a couple months, like Nightwing has done for Blader's Kingdom.
- I didn't get to play Sonic Mania today, the Switch setup was in the process of being moved. Now Sonic Cannot Be Super Sonic. :(
- I had a lot of fun at today's tournament. I hope my teammates are happy with my performance and will consider having me on their team again in a future event. They did great.
Team Format: Now With 90% More Team!
I recommend the following music for reading the report. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C86zGcA6Tw8 . Look, I play a lot of good videogames, don't judge me.
- We had 11 teams of 3 people, totalling 33 people. It was most people's first exposure to team format, myself included.
- One blader left early, their team needed to make a non-participant substitution for a match, just to keep things going.
- The weather was hot. The building is loud when enough bladers are present, and it gets a little chaotic in there.
- The tournament began around 11:45, and ended around 4. We intended to start around 11, but it turns out that seeding for a team tournament is a nightmare. For one thing, it's not covered in the rules, at all. We ended up averaging the beyrank of every team and going by that, and that took quite a bit of time. And then we had some struggles getting the round robin groups to appear in Challonge. Always some infrastructural issues to deal with.
- We were new to Team format, and surprised by a LOT of the changes. In Team Format, between 7-12 teams is group round robin, there's no deck format finals, and only the top team in each group goes to the finals. Also teams are allowed to give advice and coaching to their active blader during matches because the team is considered one entity. Lotta surprises today.
- The team I was on was LJ-Blader's. He was the team captain, since he was managing decks for both himself and MamaBey2122. I was also on this team. I would say we were a solid, effective team. LJ made some suggestions to my deck before we started, I was going to run Prominence on Over instead of Nexus+S. His suggestion was objectively correct. We all did very well today. LJ's a great blader as always, MamaBey is also quite good and although she doesn't have an extremely powerful launch she often makes combos win that probably shouldn't, and yet they do. And I? Well, I would say I do a decent job blading most of the time.
- That's why seeding was so important, we needed to make sure that the two groups were more or less balanced. We had a mooore or less similar number of evenly competitive teams in each bracket. Group A contained the unstoppable powerhouse of CrisisCrusher07, geetster99, and robert_loller. The first seeded team in group B was LJ-Blader's. Below that in group A we had an extremely powerful team of Mike.Nightwing, JCMakeEmBurst, and maxrod. A whole bunch of competitive bladers came up from down south as well, and were in group B. Beyond that there were a few other teams, including one with Allen Schaffer, who is quite good, some famiilar faces, some newer bladers, and some surprise upsets.
- I considered the possibility that a team name would be required. I had one in the back of my mind. When we registered, and they asked us for the team name, LJ paused. We hadn't discussed it. He looked at me. I was fully masked, so I don't think he saw the chaotic grin that crept over my face. I suggested the name. He agreed to it. You can see the team name in the image below.
- I bring a certain chaotic energy to tournaments; at one point I walked up to some people I knew and began doing the floss dance, mostly incorrectly. Expect the unexpected, bladers!
- One thing we should note about the tournament is that Nightwing announced we would not be relying on our phones for recording matches and judging from that. We would use our eyes. This resulted in fewer ties overall, honestly. The change in the spin rules mostly did away with some of the ties, and a lot of the matches were just way easier to call with no phones. Oh, it stressed us out a LOT because there were a lot of close ones, and I really WANTED to record a lot of the matches. But we didn't. There were a couple KO matches I would've loved to record, just to be certain, especially when the timing on a double KO is involved. I only had bladers vocally disagree with my rulings twice, but at that point with no recordings it's honestly your claim against the judge, and the judges are less biased, so, there's not much to be done there. There was One battle I feel a judge called wrong that I was involved in, but I kept it to myself. What the judge says goes. In the future, I really think we ought to be recording as normal, although the 4 hour tournament would take even longer.
- Judging for a team tournament is kind of a nightmare. You have to keep a tally of every single point in all 3 of a team's matches, and the winner is chosen based on the total points per team. I did not once see a tiebreak needed. There was also a rule in place that judges had to be from the opposite group, so given our good attention to detail, LJ and I wound up doing most of the judging for the Group A matches. This occasionally led to some issues in that we couldn't have our matches because both of us were busy. There were several times where we just put LJ last in the order for our team's matches because he was actively judging some Group A matches.
- Originally there were 4 beystadiums set up for the matches, but it just wasn't happening. We didn't have enough judges for the Group A matches, so it got cut down to 3 beystadiums, and eventually 2. We really need more judges next time across both groups, but we had issues with the local experienced judges being mostly in Group A. A little chaotic, but, eh. That's life!
- My deck for today was Vanish Bahamut Tapered Bearing'-10, Prominence Belial2 Nexus+S Morbius-6, and good ol Dynamite+F Perseus Giga Drift-0. Some of you may remember that I'd really soured on Prominence after my last couple of tournaments, but I decided "It's Probably Okay". It did very well today, surprisingly. It knocked out a while bunch of right spin and left spin, which is just bonkers to me. It defends against Guilty and has good opposite spin. And for some reason it did okay against its weakness, same spin stamina. Vanish did good work as always, even defending against Guilty and outmatching a lot of other stuff on left. And Dynamite. What's to say about my Dynamite? It has one weakness, Dynamite on Bearing, and I played the odds, and I didn't encounter it all day, so, it did really really well. It was... excessively good and powerful.
- I was loathe to try HXt+' again today, it had done so poorly for me in recent events. But I saw a lot of it today for other people and it did really well. Maybe it's just mine. I feel like it tips over way too easily, but on B-09s it is halfway decent. LJ was using it just fine. I can't remember if it was in his deck or MamaBey's. I suspect they will tell us. I still intend to avoid this driver for the most part, it has disappointed me too often.
- I never ended up changing my deck once the whole time. Sure, I shifted the order, but I never changed it. Like Eleanor Shellstrop would say, DC, "ya basic!". I feel like in 3v3 you can get away with being basic, there's no guarantee that a counter will hit correctly.
- Let's talk about bagels. It was my birthday recently. Happy 39th, DC, you're almost 40! It terrifies you. The nightmares keep getting worse. Anyway, my mother sent me some bagels in the mail, from NYC. She did not properly understand the quantity of bagels she was sending. I wound up with 48 bagels. They're good bagels, yes, but that is too many bagels! I elected to bring half to the tournament today; 22 of the 24 were consumed. Someone thankfully took the 2 remaining poppyseed bagels before they could get stuck in my teeth. I witnessed two people eating the bagels unsliced, without any cream cheese or other condiment. While I may find it personally strange, you are allowed to eat the bagels how you wish. They're good bagels, bladers!
- LJ's team did exceedingly well. Because of the way the seeding was set up, I admit that Group A was a harder set of opponents overall. With odd numbers of teams, it usually works out that way. MamaBey generally had closer matched, 2-3 or 3-2. LJ blader hit it out of the park as usual, mostly. I was sort of all over the place between 3-0 and 3-2.
- Our crucial first stage match was against "Help Me Help Us", a group of bladers who traveled a great distance to be there! They included Kirito1696 (I think?), some blader whose name I didn't quite catch but was also good, and the unfathomable ---. This was an important match for us; it appeared that whichever team won this match was going to sweep first stage in Group B, and be the only team to go to the final match. I was batting cleanup for this one. In earlier matches we'd normally stuck with the order of MamaBey, me, and then LJ. And I think our opponents were counting on that. But we switched it up, and I think that time it went LJ, MamaBey, and me. Maybe reverse the order of the first two. Anyway, It was Close going into the final match. I don't remember if it was tied or what, I think it might've been 3-2 and 2-3. And then it was me against ---. If you want to hear the music that was going through my head, it's at the top of this tournament report. I was successful, and we locked up our spot in the finals.
- We went 4-0 in Group B, so we made it to the finals. Crisis and Geetster's team The Beyblade Experience made it 5-0. I have a notoriously bad track record against Crisis in the finals of these events, so for blader order we just... shuffled the cards and see what we got. Thankfully, I didn't have to face Crisis. I did however have to battle robert_loller in the middle. What can I say? He's from out of town but he's good. He got me 1-2. He mode changed into high mode for one of the opposite spin matches, and I honestly thought it could still go either way, so I stayed in low, but he got that point. MamaBey had done better against Geetster, keeping him to 2-3, recovering some points after what looked like it might be an early sweep. But by the time LJ had to fight Crisis, we were down 3-6 and we were mostly toast. LJ would've needed to point, point, and then burst to win 4-0. Unfortunately, didn't happen; I think Crisis beat him too. Still very good matches all around!
- Our team got second place! Crisis and robert and Geetster got 1st... honestly, surprising no one. What can I say? They're good. :D
- Finals in Team format don't use deck format, just a regular team battle. You know what? Good. I'm sick of deck format.
- I think Team format is interesting, especially on 3v3. A little time consuming, but good. I'm looking forward to more of these events. Especially since being on a 2nd place team means we get an invite to the invitationals if he decides to do a tournament like that at the end of a couple months, like Nightwing has done for Blader's Kingdom.
- I didn't get to play Sonic Mania today, the Switch setup was in the process of being moved. Now Sonic Cannot Be Super Sonic. :(
- I had a lot of fun at today's tournament. I hope my teammates are happy with my performance and will consider having me on their team again in a future event. They did great.
Team Format: Now With 90% More Team!
![[Image: 4iz876.gif]](https://i.imgflip.com/4iz876.gif)
