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Toronto Beyblade Burst Tournament Report: TO BURST OR NOT TO BURST 2

Mar. 21, 2018  8:37 PM
 
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TORONTO BEYBLADE BURST TOURNAMENT REPORT
March 17, 2018 at High Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada • BURST FORMAT
OFFICIAL EVENT PAGE

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Beyblade Bursts in Popularity!


If the number of tournaments being hosted lately, and the number of participants many of them have been attracting (51 in LA, 68 in Pennsylvania, for example) are any indication, it’s safe to say that Beyblade Burst is enjoying a surge in popularity at least in the United Status since the release of Hasbro’s Beyblade Burst Switchstrike line late last year. It’s an exciting time to be in the community!

This interest has been carried up to Canada too, and despite it being a bit chilly out, on this day we pulled in 40 Bladers for our largest regular (non-convention) tournament in Toronto since the height of Metal Fight Beyblade/Beyblade: Metal Fusion!

I was glad that we acted so quickly within the past month to implement Double Elimination as an option for WBO tournaments. It really does make so much more sense for most of our events given the number of judges/hosts on hand to typically help move the event along. Swiss Format is great, but it requires a lot of dedicated staff to work well and within a reasonable amount of time once you get up past 33 participants.

Managing the Event


With events of this scale, crowd management becomes key. Especially with many participants being younger kids, it can be difficult to corral everyone and communicate efficiently. And there is a few things I'd like to consider using in the future after my experience at this event and in LA last month:

Personal Amplifier/Microphone
We’ve used personal amplifiers at Anime North before and it was a great help in being able to communicate upcoming matches and announcements to participants and parents. We were able to communicate well enough at this event, but moving forward I definitely want to look into getting a personal amplifier again. It will also help to save our voices from yelling all day. :)

Pilons/Fences
As seen in the third part of my Beyblade in Japan 2017 report during the “Kanto Strongest Blader Decision Battle” unofficial tournament, the use of pilons and fences can help greatly in being able to keep the tournament play area clear. This in turn helps to keep matches flowing quicker. We attempted to define a tournament play area before the event and announced it to everyone (ie. “Do not come on this side unless you are playing a tournament match”), but without an actual physical barrier, people inevitably drift into the areas you don’t want them to be in. I’d like to look into getting something like these in the future to improve this aspect of our events.

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Dedicated Judges
Having at least one person dedicated entirely to judging or managing the event is always a boon. Luckily for us, JesseObre was gracious enough to step aside from playing this time to focus entirely on judging matches!

Registration Process
Unfortunately, not everyone who signs up online shows up at the event … and not everyone who shows up at the event signs up online initially. To help speed up the process of getting through registration, OldSchool™ and I tag-teamed it. He wrote down the participants and fee notes, I collected the fees, and cross-referenced each new person with the pre-made Challonge bracket OldSchool™ had made the night before.

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After we registered everyone at the tournament, OldSchool™ double-checked the bracket to remove people who hadn’t showed up, did a roll call, I explained the rules, and then we started the event!

And just one note to myself: with events this big, bring more change next time haha.

Double Elimination
Using Double Elimination for the first time in many years since its reintroduction into WBO Organized Play went well. It may not be as comprehensive as Swiss Format, but it feels fair enough while also allowing for the event to run much quicker due to the elimination of participants with each passing round after the second one.

I also appreciate the structure given to the brackets in Challonge and the role seeding plays. Depending on the number of participants, higher seeds get to ‘skip’ the first round filled with a handful of the lower seeds, which I feel is quite fair and lends some additional weight and incentive to playing seriously to try and increase your rank/seed over time.

The Tournament


Not much had changed in the metagame since my last event in Los Angeles in February, so going into this one even though I didn’t have too much time to test parts such as Arc Bahamut which had emerged from obscurity, I felt quite confident in my understanding of how things would likely play out.

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A few players used Bearing-based combos other than myself–such as SUGOI-KONICHEWA–but I was surprised that it wasn’t more prominent at least among the more experienced players in the tournament.

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The most shocking event was 1234beyblade’s elimination after going 0-2. He opened up with Deep Chaos Destroy against an uncustomized tN.3H.Ul and somehow lost. I knew right-spin Destroy had bad Stamina, but to think that it’s that bad considering how strong 1234beyblade’s launch is and that his opponent was using Ultimate Reboot was surprising. Unfortunately, he didn’t have Spriggan Requiem until I gave it to him at the start of this event, so he didn’t know about how relatively tightly fitting Sr and Bearing were until it was too late, which is likely what he would have gone for against his first few opponents had he known.

In his second match, I believe he lost using Spriggan Requiem Destroy in left-spin versus ArmaanTO’s Deathscyther 6 Vortex Massive. This was even more shocking. And then, Newtype–who is also an experienced player–ended up losing to it in a similar fashion in a later round.

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I ended up being paired with ArmaanTO in the first round of the finals. I couldn’t understand why Destroy didn’t get the job done against his D.6V.M, but thought that Bearing would being able to overcome it. However, even with Sr.7.Br in left spin, I still lost the first round with it … luckily, I also had dC.0.R in my deck and was able to take care of it and the rest of his deck using that. Still, crazy that D.6V.M seemed to have been that good against left-spin.

After our battle was complete, I did a few test rounds against ArmaanTO and found that right-spin Sr Bearing could defeat his combo, though. In any case, it was great to see someone able to make it all the way to the finals using a combo most people would dismiss initially in 2018.

While it wasn’t as early of an exit from the tournament as 1234beyblade, OldSchool™’s loss to Phoenix_Ransom in the first round of the finals was also shocking. However, Phoenix_Ransom did receive help/combos from someone else in the form of things like Sr on Bearing (which was announced to OldSchool™ of course). This certainly helped his cause. OldSchool™ put up a good fight with some nice KOs on Spriggan Requiem with his Twin Nemesis Xtreme combo, but lost the match in the end, as you can see in the video at the start of my report!

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In the second round of the finals, I was paired up against SUGOI-KONICHEWA. He had chosen to use Nightmare Longinus Variable in his Deck. I had heard about this combination recently and figured that it would be good, but not against Nightmare Longinus Bump Xtreme. I was right. Xtreme was just too fast and I was able to KO it quite reliably after also KOing his tN.7M.X in the first round. I won the match 6-2.

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In the final match, I was paired up against jamie. He came armed with a trio of powerful combos as you can see in the list below, but funnily enough … none of them could defeat Spriggan Requiem on Bearing! I ended up winning the match 5-0, taking first place with a 6-0 record overall.

Looking forward to seeing where the metagame goes from here now that Beyblade Burst Super Z has been released.



Winning Combinations


1st: Kei
Spriggan Requiem 7 Bearing
Spriggan Requiem 7 Bump Bearing
MGC Maximum Garuda 7 Star Orbit
Spriggan Requiem 0 Bump Bearing (Deck Format Finals Only)
Deep Chaos 0 Revolve (Deck Format Finals Only)
Nightmare Longinus Bump Xtreme (Deck Format Finals Only)

2nd: jamie
Spriggan Requiem 0 Bump Destroy
Maximum Garuda 4 Cross Orbit
Drain Fafnir 7 Glaive Octa

3rd: SUGOI-KONICHEWA
Spriggan Requiem 0 Glaive Destroy
Spriggan Requiem 0 Glaive Bearing

Twin Nemesis 7 Meteor Xtreme (Deck Format Finals Only)
Nightmare Longinus Variable (Deck Format Finals Only)
Nightmare Longinus Destroy (Deck Format Finals Only)

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

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