Sept-18-2022: "TEAMPALOOZA: Battle Blader's Unite!" tournament reports

The following are words I have to say about "TEAMPALOOZA: Battle Blader's Unite!", a ranked tournament using Team Burst Standard 3v3 format after the release and partial availability of the Wind Knight BU Layer.

I recommend the following music for reading the report. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QizrZAZhZY . Look, I play a lot of videogames. Folks, my memory is bad, so if I end up repeating tournament report music, just let me know and I'll pick a new track.

- That's not how apostrophes work. Unless you're talking about a Unite driver and a person named Battle Blader.

- We had 7 teams of 3 people, totalling 21 people. It turns out that 7 teams makes group round robin, with one group of 4 teams and one group of 3. So two of the teams only got to play two matches today, four teams played 3, and one team played 5. Uh... 7 is the least ideal amount of teams for Group Round Robin. I honestly think we would've been better with 6, we'd have a Single Group Round Robin.

- We started around 12:25. It went until 3:30. Although we only had 7 teams, a two group round robin of 2-3 matches for each team, and there were only 9 total first round matches and 1 finals match, it took a VERY long time. Matches involved a lot of opposite spin. There were a lot of OS ties. Crisis also has a habit of having one team do a lot of the judging and saving all their matches for the end. This isn't always efficient. There were too many times during the tournament where only one match was going on.

- I just came back from a 5 day vacation two nights ago, so, I'm tired and sore. Moreso after the tournament.

- The weather was... fine, it's indoors in Mike.Nightwing's gaming loft. This time he had the regular lights on, so, I could see good! He now has 3 AC units and 2 dang good fans active. People were Actually Cold. Well, anyone in shorts. Everyone else was fine.

- Everyone who showed up more or less knew what they were doing! That's always cool. CrisisCrusher07 made this one invite-only, so that scared away anyone who could not properly read how to register. Low amount of teams, which is a downside.

- We had a bunch of different people judging, no issues there. Crisis was trying to have judges be from the opposite group.

- I was on team "Now Sonic Can be Super Sonic" with LJ-Blader (captain) and MamaBey2122. We had an okay day. Unfortunately, we were in a group with only two other teams.

- We randomized our blader order each time. Strategy can be countered with strategy. There's nothing you can do against luck. Let's just go for it, the heck with it.

- This was 3v3 team format. That means everyone prepared a deck of 3 beyblades. Dynamite Belial2+F Illegal Bearing'-0, Vanish Bahamut Giga Metal Drift-10, and for the last bey, I didn't mess with Xiphoid or Guilty this time, I stuck with a semi-useful Roar Longinus Over Zone'+Z-4. My team had similar choices, except both of them were running a Xiphoid combo.

- There were a lot of the same layers all over the place. Roar was kind of rare, Vanish and Dynamite are still everywhere. Guilty and Xiphoid were actually present in most matches! I saw a World, I saw a Rage. And for those people lucky enough to have theirs shipped in time, there was Wind. Oh my... Wind. It definitely affected my music choice this time.

- Let's talk about Wind: It's good. It's good stamina. It's halfway decent smash attack! It's very wide and thick. It's okay in same spin and opposite spin. It doesn't scrape too much it seems. It's weird and unpredictable and it can both win and lose to Dynamie and Vanish. We're going to see a LOT of this layer going forward. Dynamite and Vanish have been present all over standard for a year and a half; Wind is joining them. There were a lot of ties to judge, but most of those were Dynamite or Vanish, not as many with Wind.

- No one in my team had received their ordered random boosters for Wind yet. So... that didn't do us any favors.

- A lot of my battle wins were opposite spin, as usual. A lot. I'm very cursed. But I had some same spins too. Even won some of them.

- The two opponents I faced in the tournament were SPN_Z3R0 and RED NINJA 0829. I beat SPN, but not RED. They're both good, but RED got me. The circumstances of that match were dire, my team was down 4 points. The only way I could tie it up was by going 2-0 and then bursting him. That's when I replaced my Roar with Xiphoid. Unfortunately, it scraped a lot (I used Xanthus, bad call on my part, and had the point at the wrong spot!!!) and didn't win. I was 1-1 going into the Xiphoid match, and I think he got me 3-1 or 3-2.

- As the team in the 3 team group with 1-1 instead of 2-0, we didn't get to go to the finals. No worries. We helped judge.

- Yami was at times running a deck with both Rage and Guilty. Hilarious. I mean, if he can make it work, then go for it.

- 1st place was "The Beyblade Experience", with "#Other-Systems" in second. Overall, there were a LOT of really powerful teams out there today, a lot of DB and BU layers running around, too many close calls, and some fierce challenges all around.

- I had fun at today's tournament and we did okay, but only having 2 matches is kind of vexing. We DID travel a goodly distance to be here. I wish with 7 teams they'd let you do Single Group Round Robin.

Now go make sure you have a Wind layer.
Fun thing I forgot to mention about yesterday's tournament!

- Sometimes the DC area (not me, Washington DC) has Air Shows. And when this happens, airports have to reroute the takeoff and landing lanes. Today's tournament was interesting in that we heard an awful lot of plane takeoff and landing noises before the tournament. Maybe one or two during the tournament. They were very loud and very close. This was an outlier, this does not generally happen at the loft.
Nice tournament report Crab. Yeah it’s really hard to get the judging split up to where we can get more matches going in team format. I really need to figure out the best way to do it.

I also agree that it was really unfair that the tournament had to be played as group round robin with only 7 teams being present. They should have group round robin start at 8 teams instead of 7. That way it will be even.

Wind is super good. I was lucky enough to have BeybladeBlast11 let our team use one for the tournament. Funny enough originally I was gonna let geetster99 use it. Then he decided it should be me using it because I was using triple stamina instead of 2 stamina and 1 attack like him and Kirito1696. I’m really glad it happened that way. I was able to 3-1 all of my opponents.

All in all it was still a great day, and I had lots of fun. Now I have to order the random booster for myself!
As of today I have tested positive for COVID-19. I was mostly masked for the tournament, I don't know if I had it from the vacation or plane travel before, caught it at the tournament from one of you, got it after from the plumbers on Monday, or if my booster yesterday literally gave it to me. It is a mystery.

Realistically speaking, if I had it already, I probably didn't give it to anyone else, because I was masked, mostly. But, better safe than sorry.

All attendees of the tournament should take a COVID-19 test just to be on the safe side.
The Supreme One
geetster99
CrisisCrusher07
RED NINJA 0829
Yami
JCMakeEmBurst
Friedpasta
BeybladeBlast11
Mike.Nightwing
OnTheDL
Kirito1696
LJ-Blader
MamaBey2122
SPN_Z3R0
Godly_Requiem
NathanDelta
GuppyNate
SandwichBred
Bardle
Zayjeff

This is exactly the sort of thing I was worried about.