The following are all words I have to say about "DB Stadium Try Outs", a burst standard unranked tournament that took place after Guilty's release in DB Beystadiums.
---
- It was a nice day. Not too warm, not too cold. A nice breeze in the air. Autumn. Autumn is prime time for Beyblade tournaments in the mid-Atlantic.
- We had a 15 person double round robin, with 8 in one group and 7 in the other. We only ran 3 beystadiums and they were usually running matches. It finished very quickly, compared to other tournaments. One of the good things about round robin is you don't need to wait for all the matches in a round to complete before conducting matches from another round; you already know who everyone is going to face (everyone else in the group) and it can be a very speedy tournament, especially if you don't run into ties all that often. We didn't run into ties all that often!
- We used the DB Beystadiums exclusively. It makes for a very different experience. Actually I found it a lot more Fun. More enjoyable. Less boring. The two outer rings have almost no incline, and beys can spend a lot of time there depending on how you launch. This can work for and against you, depending on your combo. The middle bowl is MUCH STEEPER than standard beystadiums, and as a result the ties usually weren't. That increased angle led to way fewer ties. Funny.
- Important to note, Rubber Flat attack tips DO NOT WORK WELL IN DB BEYSTADIUM. They suffer TREMENDOUSLY. If you flower pattern launch, they barely spend any time in the middle, losing most of their stamina up on the side rings. You can't, you just can't. Use Destroy or a stationary attack tip. Or Drift.
- Attack types have a much harder time here, as there are only two pockets. They're angled much sharper than the flat back pockets in the standard beystadium, so when they bounce off the pocket wall, they go Straight Down into the pocket. No mystery here, they're just gone. I did not see a single pocket wall bounce back in all tournament. I discussed wall bounce with Crisis ahead of time, and it sounded like for testing purposes we were going to skip counting them as a KO. It Never Came Up. We can probably just do away with the wall bounce KO rule on DB beystadiums and let the beys fall where they may (into the pocket).
- That isn't to say that I didn't see KOs. They happened. There was a lot of Guilty and Savior at this tournament (some people were testing attack types almost exclusively) and attack types DID get the KOs they sought. It can be a little harder, but it happens.
- Originally we were planning on having both the pockets be on the left and right of each bladers, but they would not fit in the cardboard boxes we were using to fence off beystadiums. We ended up having them at a 45 degree angle. Honestly, this was fine. It probably led to a few more KOs, and the occasional rare self-KO.
- I helped main judge one of the three beystadiums. We had 5 judges total out of 15 people, so, this went quickly. I saw a lot of different combos and tips and discs, but overall I'd say that the steepness of the main bowl led to scraping on some tips and discs, more than usual. Depending on the angle of your tip and your opponents, it was possible to get pushed down against the bowl, to the detriment of your stamina.
- It was also possible in same spin that some launches came down to lucky situations where one bey pushed the other into an outer ring or the wall. My bey felt the crunch on that wall more than once!
- We had some ties, not many. There were some matches we felt we needed to record; not many. A few more in the finals of course.
- I went 6-0 in the first round. Crisis and Allen and others were busy testing attack types in the beystadium, others were using different stamina and defense combos. But me? I finally remembered that I had a really good Drift driver, that launches really well without going wild TOO often (it still can). So I thought, I'll just just Dynamite Belial+F Over Drift-10 for the entirety of round robin. It's a winner, isn't it? It did well in standard beystadiums, maybe it will do well here. And it did. Extremely well. Not many ties either. Some, but usually in its favor. What can I say? I have trouble switching away from what's working.
- I went 6-0, JL-Blader went 5-1, and we had a 4-2 in the group of 7 I was in. The other group with 8... the top was four people with a 5-2 record. Amazing. It came down to amount of wins against tied bladers. Two of them had beaten 2/3 of the other people in the tie, and two of then 1/3. The 2/3s went to the finals. The seeding went me, JL-Blader, Ryanthedragon, and then Allen (Ryan had beaten Allen in their match). Round Robin's funny, you never have to worry about oddities like Buchholz. You KNOW who's going to the finals and if you have to do a tiebreaker it's rare.
- High Mode did not do all that well in this tournament. There were some people locked onto high mode because of the L Gear on Dynamite, and there were some people who chose to switch to High Mode. I do not recally seeing a ton of high mode success. In particular my Dynamte combo (unchanged from stage 1) did well against Allen. He has some very good combos against low mode Dynamite Drift, but he did not bring them to our match.
- In the finals I faced Ryanthedragon. He's quite good. Our match was fairly close. It was the first time all tournament I switched away from using Dynamite Drift, and scored a point with Roar Fafnir Giga Bearing-0. That combo? Still good in DB Beystadium. But I ended up switching back to Dynamite because Ryan had an L gear on his own Dynamite, and I decided the answer was "launch harder". It was fairly close, but I managed to eke out a victory. I got 1st place, Ryan 2nd, Allen third, LJ fourth.
- I carried my eventual deck format with me the entire time, despite using one single bey 94% of the time. The other combos I'd built were my Roar Fafnia Giga Bearing-10, and Guilty Longinus Karma Destroy'-2. I can't bring myself to use Metal Destroy, I'm not sure if I'll ever use Metal drivers. I must protec my teefs! I did not use the Longinus the entire tournament.
- The Burst Standard meta is a lot easier to put up with on a DB Beystadium. Yes, you get opposite spin matches, but they don't tie nearly as much because of the angle of the beystadium bowl. I enjoyed it and I'm starting to see why some people want to make DB Beystadiums an option in ranked Burst tournaments. The ties did not weigh us down and make us miserable. Drift and Bearing and Zone'+Z are still a curse but the matches were at least fun to watch because the beystadium behaves so differently. This tournament made me think maybe we don't need 3v3 or 3 consecutive tie rules if we allow this beystadium. Guilty is helping to solve the Bearing problem with maximum violence. Good thing too, since Bearing' is on the way, for some absurd reason.
- After the tournament, Allen and Crisis and Friedpasta all took turns testing combos to defeat my Dynamite Drift combo. Some of them worked, some of them didn't. But I stuck around and let them throw combos against it because I'm hoping they come up with some good defeats for it. Astral has possibilities. Atomic can work, although it's not 100%; Drift does a lot of destabilizing itself. Anything in high mode is Basically Doomed. Opposite spins are Usually Doomed. Guilty and Savior were mostly unable to thwart my particular Dynamite Drift in the DB Beystadiums.
- There was a lot of Guilty testing going on in both standard and DB beystadiums. In a standard Beystadium, Guilty is exactly the kind of destructive force we need to unclog the defensive meta. Guilty Karma is 8 grams heavier than Rage 3A when I weighed it, and plenty violent. It does extremely good things on a standard beystadium. On a DB beystadium, it suffers quite a bit because rubber flat tips Do Not Work well in that beystadium, but I saw plenty of Guilty on Drift and Destroy and other tips. I saw it burst a Dynamite. I saw them do plenty of KOs. I think it will save us from standard beystadium problems, and it's still viable (less so) on a DB beystadium.
- I would not mind having more round robin tournaments. I could really go for a 4 group round robin tournament. That'd be fun. Top two from each group. Make it an option for 24-32 bladers. Round robin tournaments don't get stuck waiting for one match at the end of a swiss round. You finish a match, there's always more matches to do, and it doesn't matter what round they're from. Yes, it does peculiar things to the pool of people you play against. I didn't get to face Allen or Ryanthedragon until the finals, after all. But there's never a question of who goes to the finals when round robin is involved. No complicated Buchholz, tiebreakers perhaps a little more common but not guaranteed. And what's even better, if you know someone's going to arrive late you can just add them and start without them, and start doing their matches once they arrive, because they aren't holding anyone up, and you can do whichever matches whenever in the first stage. Unlike in Swiss, where all the round 1 matches have to happen before round 2 matches can be assigned.
- I got some bad family medical news between the semi-finals and finals match. It really took the wind out of my sails. It didn't affect my ability to win, I mean, I won today. No prize, but I'm not really motivated by prizes or beyrank anyway. But I've had some work and family difficulties lately, and this particular health issue is icing on a very distasteful cake. I should be celebrating... but I can't. Folks, please make good medical decisions and not bad medical decisions. Your health is important.
I got 1st place. I had a lot more fun than I do at standard beystadium double blind tournaments. I like the new beystadium. I actually enjoy group round robin as a format. And I'm looking forward to seeing Guilty destroy all staminas in the old beystadium.
---
- It was a nice day. Not too warm, not too cold. A nice breeze in the air. Autumn. Autumn is prime time for Beyblade tournaments in the mid-Atlantic.
- We had a 15 person double round robin, with 8 in one group and 7 in the other. We only ran 3 beystadiums and they were usually running matches. It finished very quickly, compared to other tournaments. One of the good things about round robin is you don't need to wait for all the matches in a round to complete before conducting matches from another round; you already know who everyone is going to face (everyone else in the group) and it can be a very speedy tournament, especially if you don't run into ties all that often. We didn't run into ties all that often!
- We used the DB Beystadiums exclusively. It makes for a very different experience. Actually I found it a lot more Fun. More enjoyable. Less boring. The two outer rings have almost no incline, and beys can spend a lot of time there depending on how you launch. This can work for and against you, depending on your combo. The middle bowl is MUCH STEEPER than standard beystadiums, and as a result the ties usually weren't. That increased angle led to way fewer ties. Funny.
- Important to note, Rubber Flat attack tips DO NOT WORK WELL IN DB BEYSTADIUM. They suffer TREMENDOUSLY. If you flower pattern launch, they barely spend any time in the middle, losing most of their stamina up on the side rings. You can't, you just can't. Use Destroy or a stationary attack tip. Or Drift.
- Attack types have a much harder time here, as there are only two pockets. They're angled much sharper than the flat back pockets in the standard beystadium, so when they bounce off the pocket wall, they go Straight Down into the pocket. No mystery here, they're just gone. I did not see a single pocket wall bounce back in all tournament. I discussed wall bounce with Crisis ahead of time, and it sounded like for testing purposes we were going to skip counting them as a KO. It Never Came Up. We can probably just do away with the wall bounce KO rule on DB beystadiums and let the beys fall where they may (into the pocket).
- That isn't to say that I didn't see KOs. They happened. There was a lot of Guilty and Savior at this tournament (some people were testing attack types almost exclusively) and attack types DID get the KOs they sought. It can be a little harder, but it happens.
- Originally we were planning on having both the pockets be on the left and right of each bladers, but they would not fit in the cardboard boxes we were using to fence off beystadiums. We ended up having them at a 45 degree angle. Honestly, this was fine. It probably led to a few more KOs, and the occasional rare self-KO.
- I helped main judge one of the three beystadiums. We had 5 judges total out of 15 people, so, this went quickly. I saw a lot of different combos and tips and discs, but overall I'd say that the steepness of the main bowl led to scraping on some tips and discs, more than usual. Depending on the angle of your tip and your opponents, it was possible to get pushed down against the bowl, to the detriment of your stamina.
- It was also possible in same spin that some launches came down to lucky situations where one bey pushed the other into an outer ring or the wall. My bey felt the crunch on that wall more than once!
- We had some ties, not many. There were some matches we felt we needed to record; not many. A few more in the finals of course.
- I went 6-0 in the first round. Crisis and Allen and others were busy testing attack types in the beystadium, others were using different stamina and defense combos. But me? I finally remembered that I had a really good Drift driver, that launches really well without going wild TOO often (it still can). So I thought, I'll just just Dynamite Belial+F Over Drift-10 for the entirety of round robin. It's a winner, isn't it? It did well in standard beystadiums, maybe it will do well here. And it did. Extremely well. Not many ties either. Some, but usually in its favor. What can I say? I have trouble switching away from what's working.
- I went 6-0, JL-Blader went 5-1, and we had a 4-2 in the group of 7 I was in. The other group with 8... the top was four people with a 5-2 record. Amazing. It came down to amount of wins against tied bladers. Two of them had beaten 2/3 of the other people in the tie, and two of then 1/3. The 2/3s went to the finals. The seeding went me, JL-Blader, Ryanthedragon, and then Allen (Ryan had beaten Allen in their match). Round Robin's funny, you never have to worry about oddities like Buchholz. You KNOW who's going to the finals and if you have to do a tiebreaker it's rare.
- High Mode did not do all that well in this tournament. There were some people locked onto high mode because of the L Gear on Dynamite, and there were some people who chose to switch to High Mode. I do not recally seeing a ton of high mode success. In particular my Dynamte combo (unchanged from stage 1) did well against Allen. He has some very good combos against low mode Dynamite Drift, but he did not bring them to our match.
- In the finals I faced Ryanthedragon. He's quite good. Our match was fairly close. It was the first time all tournament I switched away from using Dynamite Drift, and scored a point with Roar Fafnir Giga Bearing-0. That combo? Still good in DB Beystadium. But I ended up switching back to Dynamite because Ryan had an L gear on his own Dynamite, and I decided the answer was "launch harder". It was fairly close, but I managed to eke out a victory. I got 1st place, Ryan 2nd, Allen third, LJ fourth.
- I carried my eventual deck format with me the entire time, despite using one single bey 94% of the time. The other combos I'd built were my Roar Fafnia Giga Bearing-10, and Guilty Longinus Karma Destroy'-2. I can't bring myself to use Metal Destroy, I'm not sure if I'll ever use Metal drivers. I must protec my teefs! I did not use the Longinus the entire tournament.
- The Burst Standard meta is a lot easier to put up with on a DB Beystadium. Yes, you get opposite spin matches, but they don't tie nearly as much because of the angle of the beystadium bowl. I enjoyed it and I'm starting to see why some people want to make DB Beystadiums an option in ranked Burst tournaments. The ties did not weigh us down and make us miserable. Drift and Bearing and Zone'+Z are still a curse but the matches were at least fun to watch because the beystadium behaves so differently. This tournament made me think maybe we don't need 3v3 or 3 consecutive tie rules if we allow this beystadium. Guilty is helping to solve the Bearing problem with maximum violence. Good thing too, since Bearing' is on the way, for some absurd reason.
- After the tournament, Allen and Crisis and Friedpasta all took turns testing combos to defeat my Dynamite Drift combo. Some of them worked, some of them didn't. But I stuck around and let them throw combos against it because I'm hoping they come up with some good defeats for it. Astral has possibilities. Atomic can work, although it's not 100%; Drift does a lot of destabilizing itself. Anything in high mode is Basically Doomed. Opposite spins are Usually Doomed. Guilty and Savior were mostly unable to thwart my particular Dynamite Drift in the DB Beystadiums.
- There was a lot of Guilty testing going on in both standard and DB beystadiums. In a standard Beystadium, Guilty is exactly the kind of destructive force we need to unclog the defensive meta. Guilty Karma is 8 grams heavier than Rage 3A when I weighed it, and plenty violent. It does extremely good things on a standard beystadium. On a DB beystadium, it suffers quite a bit because rubber flat tips Do Not Work well in that beystadium, but I saw plenty of Guilty on Drift and Destroy and other tips. I saw it burst a Dynamite. I saw them do plenty of KOs. I think it will save us from standard beystadium problems, and it's still viable (less so) on a DB beystadium.
- I would not mind having more round robin tournaments. I could really go for a 4 group round robin tournament. That'd be fun. Top two from each group. Make it an option for 24-32 bladers. Round robin tournaments don't get stuck waiting for one match at the end of a swiss round. You finish a match, there's always more matches to do, and it doesn't matter what round they're from. Yes, it does peculiar things to the pool of people you play against. I didn't get to face Allen or Ryanthedragon until the finals, after all. But there's never a question of who goes to the finals when round robin is involved. No complicated Buchholz, tiebreakers perhaps a little more common but not guaranteed. And what's even better, if you know someone's going to arrive late you can just add them and start without them, and start doing their matches once they arrive, because they aren't holding anyone up, and you can do whichever matches whenever in the first stage. Unlike in Swiss, where all the round 1 matches have to happen before round 2 matches can be assigned.
- I got some bad family medical news between the semi-finals and finals match. It really took the wind out of my sails. It didn't affect my ability to win, I mean, I won today. No prize, but I'm not really motivated by prizes or beyrank anyway. But I've had some work and family difficulties lately, and this particular health issue is icing on a very distasteful cake. I should be celebrating... but I can't. Folks, please make good medical decisions and not bad medical decisions. Your health is important.
I got 1st place. I had a lot more fun than I do at standard beystadium double blind tournaments. I like the new beystadium. I actually enjoy group round robin as a format. And I'm looking forward to seeing Guilty destroy all staminas in the old beystadium.
![[Image: im-coming-for-you-ghostface.gif]](https://i.postimg.cc/yxDQrdSs/im-coming-for-you-ghostface.gif)
![[Image: 88-E6-FCCC-E8-AF-48-FB-A3-F2-32-E31-D8-DDA09.jpg]](https://i.postimg.cc/q7DDdNkV/88-E6-FCCC-E8-AF-48-FB-A3-F2-32-E31-D8-DDA09.jpg)
![[Image: 84-CB9286-C306-4-D2-D-B3-E2-CD380-EA5-E132.jpg]](https://i.postimg.cc/sgfQnGSM/84-CB9286-C306-4-D2-D-B3-E2-CD380-EA5-E132.jpg)
