Road to the Shin TA: The Big Apple Warrior, The Return of the Big Apple! Report

This will be reporting the first tournament NYC has gotten since Covid-19 along with it being swaglakitu's first tournament as a WBO Organizer.

The tournament started off late in which it was supposed to start at 11:30 am but got pushed to 12:40 pm due to a lack of clarification on my end regarding the exact location at Central Park in which Armor,m61199, and myself spent over an hour walking around most of the park before being able to meet up with swaglakitu.  I took a few minutes to catch my breath before setting up all of the Shin TAs for the tournament.  The weather for the tournament was our biggest concern in which it was very sunny from 11 am-12 pm before it mostly became cloudy afterward.  A good amount of the participants dropped out due to said weather concerns in which we ended up with 13 out of 18 people for the tournament.

This changed the first stage into a group round robin where the participants were split into two groups in which the top 2 of each block will move on into the Top 4.  The first stage was rather eventful as many players have gotten points with Meteo combos against attack-type combos with a large number of wall saves.  LazerBeamz, Armor, NewRocChampion1, and Swaglakitu along with myself were pretty efficient in keeping matches going for the most part.  I mostly ran a deck with Flame230 CS, Bakushin MF, and Meteo EWD in which I got literally saved by plot armor of Meteo getting wall saved or me hard launching Meteo to stall on the ridge to knock out attack types at times.  

We managed to finish the group stage by 2 pm in which AJ23god, swaglakitu, myself, and Armor made the Top 4.  Armor and KingyGSD had to do a tiebreaker match for the final spot in the top 4 where Armor managed to win 3-0 despite losing to KingyGSD initially.  My match with swaglakitu was close and we switched around between Meteo, DK, and Flame230CS.  I got selfish from having a perfect 6-0 record in the first stage and getting lucky with Meteo in which swaglakitu won the match with DK Begirados.

Armor and AJ23god's match was very interesting, to say the least.  AJ23god had a strong lead over Armor with his Libra MF and an aggressive Bakushin RSF combo.  AJ23god had a 4-0 lead in which he made a very interesting decision to use Gravity F230GCF against Armor's Meteo WD.  Armor ends up reverse-sweeping with Meteo alone to get the final spot in the Top 2.

My match with AJ23god did not go too well.  I, unfortunately, did not expect his Bakushin RSF to be aggressive enough to knock out Meteo nor expecting Libra MF to outlast Bakushin MF personally.  AJ23god won 3rd place after knocking out my Meteo combo with his own.

The finals which consisted of Armor VS swaglakitu was probably one of the most exciting matches in the tournament.  Armor was notable in being the only person to use combo Gravity CH120MF and stuck with it throughout most of the match.  Despite DK's ability to hit extremely hard even being able to knock around tall stamina combos, Armor stuck to his guns to win the match 5-2 over swaglakitu.

Here are some interesting notes I would like to point out for the tournament:

-There was a bit of Libra usage with it mostly being low stamina or Libra MF in AJ23god's case.

-Lightning still had a fair amount of usage in the first stage from players Blankk and Kingy GSD.

-While DK may have certain strengths over Lightning, I can say there is a higher skill ceiling to use it personally, but not as high as having the perfect, balance-tuned 20XX Gravity combo.

-NYC will have good representation for MFB from players swaglakitu, AJ23god, Blankk, and Kingy GSD.



As the organizer who has co-hosted with swaglakitu, I will say he has organized his first event well with assistance from others.  While he may have forgotten to check if his challonge account was a part of the WBO challonge community, he has done an excellent job in helping newer players with the rules and keeping matches going for the tournament despite our late start.  I have the utmost faith that he will be an excellent WBO organizer for NYC with support from his fellow players and other organizers to keep the scene going.

Overall, this was a very fun tournament and hope to see more MFB from NYC and NJ in the near future.


Top 4 tournament footage from Armor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qnhGfJVCMo