So, as most of you already know, tyler tabman piloted windup "stun" to a victory at the NAWCQ this weekend. I applaud him for his intelligent meta choice. Now, some of us have to think... what does this mean for our meta? Will the resurgence of windups lead to the return of maindecked maxx cs? If windups catch on, even temporarily, the meta may see another shift, much like the one witnessed with the rise of chaos dragons. Chaos dragons i feel are the deck most affected by this change. The return to windups would make mained maxx c's a necessity for this often slow starting deck. The return of windups would likely lead to the return of the rabbit dominated rock paper scissors meta of a few months back, as windups often have trouble dealing with first turn laggia or dolkka. Chaos dragons can overcome windups, although sometimes the loop can be costly. It seems that the main reason windups topped this event is due to unpreparedness among the players present. As for me personally, I feel that without this element of surprise, outside of the loop, windups really cannot control the meta. I don't know how many of the feature matches i saw had at least one game end in a first turn loop for the windup player. However, in games where the player had maxx c and drew it at the opportune time, the windup player still got wrecked just as hard as it hit them 2-3 months ago. Windups cannot adapt away their weakness to maxx c without giving up a large portion of their consistency. Adding cards such as dimensional fissure simply opens another element that can clog a windup players first turn hand. Another point this brings up is the resurgence in the value of maxx c perhaps. Will maxx c see a regain in value, even after its reprint? The scariest prospect this opens up is regarding the next banlist.... I can just imagine konami hitting windups and leaving rabbit and inzektors untouched, and saying "see, we fixed it!". I was already in support of a hit to the windup loop, but i dont want to see it at the cost of sacky decks like rabbit and inzektors going untouched. This is just my stumbling low quality post about this.
-Tsgreen
Imo wind ups won because of people just didn't prepare for them, they took them out of the equation for the most part.
ReplyDeleteWe have this scenario happen before though, at YCS Atlanta everyone was packing Dark World hate because it was the next big deck then when it didn't even get a single spot in the top 32 people wrote it off. At YCS Long Beach(the following YCS) Dark World won the event because everyone took them out of the equation since they didn't get any tops at Atlanta everyone didn't think they were a threat. This is exactly what happened at NAWCQ and is most likely why wind ups won.
I have to disagree with the Dark World comparison. Dark Worlds did not top at atlanta because the meta was very well prepared for them and the dark world players did not innovate. However, at YCS long beach, an extremely personalized and "teched out" dark world deck topped, piloted by an extremely well prepared meta player, namely michael balan. However, in the case of windups, this was not one well prepared meta player, but a collective decision on the part of many as a meta choice. It definitely paid off.
DeleteThank you for commenting
-Tsgreen