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Toronto Beyblade Burst Tournament Report: RATHER LOST LONGINUS

May. 29, 2017  6:57 PM
 
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TORONTO BEYBLADE BURST TOURNAMENT REPORT:
RATHER LOST LONGINUS
May 13, 2017 at High Park in Toronto, Ontario Canada • BURST FORMAT
OFFICIAL EVENT PAGE • RESULTS SPREADSHEET

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Note: For context, this was written before BEYBLADE NORTH 2017. Also worth noting that while a few players had Drain Fafnir at this event, nobody had Atomic yet, which went on to become a significant factor at BEYBLADE NORTH 2017.

After being delayed one week due to weather concerns, nine members of the Toronto WBO community gathered at High Park on May 13th for what will best become remembered as the last tournament to be hosted prior to the WBO’s decision to ban Deathscyther and Dark Deathscyther from Organized Play for the foreseeable future.

Our previous regular Burst Format event–LIVE ACTION REBOOT–came on the heels of TAKARA-TOMY’s announcement of their addition of Dark Deathscyther to their “Hall of Fame”. It ended up being perhaps one of the most dominant performances of D and D2 to date, but this time around, there was one key difference: Drain Fafnir. Read on to find out how D and D2 faired in their last tournament and how much Drain Fafnir impacted the results.

First Stage: Round Robin
With nine players registered, we played a full round robin event. For some reason Mitsu experienced some problems with Challonge and had to refresh the page basically every time he inputted a result … not sure why. As much as I love Challonge, they really need to make a proper app.

Everyone basically knew what was coming with regards to D and D2, and we all joked about being able to use them one last time–especially JesseObre who has become notorious for his D and D2 usage and resulting dominance (although for as much as we joke about Jesse spamming DHD and D2GD, he does sprinkle in some Attack usage with some frequency).

I was surprised early on in my first match-up with jameschaos when he pulled out DSR against my D2GD, as I wasn’t aware he had it. Apparently he only got it this week … a little late to the party haha. Thankfully, my D2 was pretty well-balanced and his Deathscyther despite being new bursted relatively easily (I’ve heard from some people that the black one is easier to burst, but I’ve never really been sure since I’ve been using the green/blue ones from RBV2 for a long time). I was able to dodge a bullet and win 3-1.

But after that, I didn’t end up using D2 at all for the rest of the tournament. However, it was successfully used by several other players throughout the tournament: JesseObre, Mitsu, and BAWB18. I do remember Mitsu losing a Burst Finish-filled D2 mirror match though … glad those will be a thing of the past!

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After I played jameschaos, things got interesting in my next match versus Mitsu. I decided to go with Drain Fafnir Polish Yielding, knowing that it was likely he would choose Deathscyther on Revolve. The night before this event I finally had time to test dF and after testing multiple Disks and Drivers on it I found–to my surprise–that Polish was performing the best on it and that Hold was good against Defense and Yielding was good against Revolve. I do think that perhaps there could be a better disk for it on Yielding, but I like Polish on Hold particularly because of the bigger surface area given to the Beyblade to steal spin and given that with Hold, Life After Death doesn’t really matter as much given that when it wins it’s often resting on the side of Hold’s tip before toppling over. I did also try some of the Core Disks/Frames but didn’t like them as much. But I will need to experiment more on this front.

In any case, for this battle with Mitsu he ultimately won 3-2. I was able to burst him in the first round (which was unusual based on my testing), OS him once, and he was able to OS me three times. However, there was one round that was called a draw in which several spectators (including myself) thought that dF had edged out the win. It’s a close match-up either way that perhaps could have been tilted more in my favour if I launched a bit harder in some of the rounds to get better balance early on.

I used Drain Fafnir Polish Hold in a couple other matches throughout the event and was able to win each one, but in each case it was against combinations that weren’t necessarily top tier (J2IA, OGN, Hasbro YGD). Although, OGN was able to KO me twice.

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1234beyblade on the other hand, had been telling me about Drain Fafnir Yell Revolve prior to this event, but I didn’t find much success with it against top tier combinations like DHR in my testing. Yell’s LAD is quite good, and given that it is being used on a left-spinning Beyblade, you don’t have to worry as much about it bursting as you would on right-spin where we found it to be a bit more prone to doing so. Even though I prefer Hold or Yielding right now, I do think Yell works best for the Revolve variant at this point in time, and it is definitely a good combo to beat a lot of random stuff new players might throw at you.

I can’t recall all of his matches, but I do know that after using it once or twice in the round robin 1234beyblade wasn’t feeling as confident with dF.Y.R as he had been going in, and switched to mainly WHR for the rest of the first stage.

As for Deathscyther, I used DHR a couple times throughout the event. I was able to narrowly win a match-up against JesseObre’s V2GA (although this is about par for the course by Deathscyther standards; I’ve found that it often is able to win battles like this narrowly). And I was able to win a rare burst-less Deathscyther vs. Deathscyther match-up against 1234beyblade’s DYR 3-1. That battle was probably one of the best Deathscyther vs. Deathscyther battles I’ve played because of how perfectly balanced both of our combos were. It reminded me a lot of the battles I saw on my trips to Japan where there was minimal bursting in this type of match-up.

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I didn’t see the match, but I do know that 1234beyblade was able to defeat Mitsu’s DGR with his WHR during their round robin match-up; this is something I feel that only is possible when the Deathscyther in use is not well-balanced, the Wyvern is, and the Wyvern user is very strong.

JesseObre borrowed my dF.P.Y when playing against 1234beyblade and was able to win one round via OS, but two rounds via KO at the start of the battle against his Deathscyther.

After all of the battles for the first stage were completed, I (7-1), JesseObre (7-1), jameschaos (5-3), and 1234beyblade (5-3) emerged as the top four players to advance to the finals!


Second Stage: Deck Format Finals

JesseObre vs. jameschaos
For the Deck Format Finals, JesseObre (2nd Seed) and jameschaos (3rd Seed) were paired up with each other for the first round. jameschaos was participating in the finals for the second time ever after having first done so at WELCOME TO A&C GAMES III a few months ago. However, unfortunately for jameschaos, after somehow defeating JesseObre’s WHR with his YSG early on, Jesse didn’t look back and was able to sweep the rest of the match using WHR once he started launching harder. Going into the battle he knew that jameschaos’ Deathscyther might not have the best balance, so that allowed him to go with a Deathscyther-less deck having made the assumption that his WHR would be good enough to get him by.

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Kei vs. 1234beyblade
In the other first round match-up of the finals, as the first seed I was paired up against 1234beyblade, the fourth seed. As the only other person in the tournament who had Drain Fafnir other than myself, I knew he would choose it as one of his Beyblades, but I wasn’t too concerned about it knowing he would likely choose dF.Y.R, which–as I mentioned earlier–I hadn’t found to be as good as Yielding or Hold in my initial testing.

I opened with dF.P.H however, and lost to his dF.Y.R. After that I declined a replay and he chose to stay with his combo, allowing me to switch over to DHR. We played this match-up a few times, with Deathscyther winning twice, and Drain Fafnir winning once, to my surprise. After that, 1234beyblade switched to VHA and I won with Deathscyther once via OS, and then again via burst to win the match.

1234beyblade vs. jameschaos (3rd/4th Place Battle)
Don’t remember too much about this battle, but 1234beyblade was able to win quite handily, and finished off the battle with a burst on jameschaos’ DGR with his VKY. 1234beyblade was upset about losing against me with my DHR bursting his VHA (I do wonder if he had used Knucke instead of Heavy it would have been a different story like it was in this battle with his VKY … although he apparently thinks Knuckle providing burst resistance to Valkyrie is a “myth” lol), so I was happy to see him get the win here.

Was also impressed by jameschaos’ performance throughout the day. It’s encouraging to see newer players slowly work their way up to the finals and better records after playing in several tournaments.

Kei vs. JesseObre (1st/2nd Place Battle)
For once, my fellow DAY BREAKERS teammate and I were meeting in the final battle and not the first battle of the finals! I was a little bit worried he would borrow dF from 1234beyblade, but it didn’t seem like that was going to happen based on what I could hear, so I successfully predicted that he would pretty much use his standard deck as of late (D, D2, V2; although he does switch up the Attack type sometimes). I countered that with DHR, dF.P.H (because I predicted he would use D2 on Defense), and bR.2G.Z.

The battle opened with my DHR versus his V2KA. In retrospect, this was a pretty bad opener because I had a feeling he would open with V2 after having used it in the first stage round robin against me. However, I believe I was able to pull out the win against it, and via a last second burst too to go up 2-0.

We then ended up switching Beyblades several times, including me stupidly switching to dF.P.H against his DHR when I was up 3-2; I had figured he would switch out after winning the round, but he didn’t and then I lost with my bR.2G.Z, allowing him to go up 4-3. I really like that bR combo in testing (against D and D2 mainly), but in two rounds total played with it in Deck Format finals recently now, I’ve lost with it twice … very small sample size since my tolerance for this type of thing in a combo that isn’t proven is pretty low in a tournament situation. I do think my own hesitation is part of the reason why I haven’t been successful with it yet, though (or maybe it’s actually just bad lol). That’s half the battle, I think; being able to find a good combo and then also be confident with it when you pull it out in a competitive situation.

After losing with bR.2G.Z, I took the risk and switched to DHR as that was the only thing I had with a somewhat sure chance of winning against anything in his deck. Jesse obviously responded by switching to V2KA, and luckily I was able to win 5-4 ultimately!

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You can see the Decks that were used throughout the finals below:

JesseObre vs. jameschaos
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Kei vs. 1234beyblade
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1234beyblade vs. jameschaos (3rd/4th Place Battle)
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Kei vs. JesseObre (1st/2nd Place Battle)
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Final Thoughts
If you’re reading this, BEYBLADE NORTH 2017 has already passed. I’m writing this with a lot of work ahead of me to prepare for that event, trying to guess what the metagame is going to be like post-Deathscyther and Dark Deathscyther.

After this event, 1234beyblade basically predicted that it would just be Drain Fafnir everywhere. I didn’t agree entirely, but thought that it would be basically even between dF, L2, and various Stamina variants (Wyvern, Odin, Neptune, maybe Blaze Ragnaruk). dF is still inconsistent for me against right-spin Stamina, and also reliant upon the Driver match-up between both combos.


Videos by Mitsu



More Photos
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Winning Combinations

1st: Kei
Deathscyther Heavy Revolve
Dark Deathscyther Gravity Defense
Wyvern Heavy Revolve
Drain Fafnir Polish Hold

2nd: JesseObre
Deathscyther Heavy Defense
Dark Deathscyther Gravity Defense
Wyvern Heavy Revolve
Deathscyther Heavy Revolve
Drain Fafnir Polish Yielding
Victory Valkyrie Knuckle Accel (Deck Format Finals Only)

3rd: 1234beyblade
Drain Fafnir Yell Revolve
Wyvern Heavy Revolve
Valkyrie Knuckle Yielding (Deck Format Finals Only)


Thanks for reading! If you have any questions about this event, please feel free to post below!

More Toronto Beyblade Tournament Reports
If you enjoyed this report, then you may also enjoy some of my other Toronto Beyblade Burst tournament reports: