November Update + Raffle Results

Firstly, winners of the Raffle this month:

Young Cat Tier: Avaltus
SVM Tier: Geralf

As always, winners can DM me on Discord to organise a coaching session. BCS should be upcoming for many of you, so make sure to set something up!

This month has been a little slower than the other months and this is because I have been very busy with travelling across the world! As many of you know, I placed top 8 at BCS Vietnam and Top 4 at BCS Yogyakarta respectively.

Afterwards, I played at the Dragon Ball Fusion World Nationals in Melbourne, where I placed 3rd overall.

Next week, I will be flying out for One Piece/SVE double header weekend. Considering I also work full time, finding the spare time to get everything done has been rough. Luckily, everything calms down for me after this weekend, so less interruptions are expected.

That said, there is a private issue that is outside my control... Depending on how it plays out, I will let you know of any impacts on my future plans.

I put out a Tier List video for BP07 yesterday. I found the feedback on this video to be quite interesting. Many people don't seem to think Natura Dragon/Natura Forest very good, but I can assure you guys, those decks are very good. Obviously, Natura Sword is a frontrunner for BDIF, but I don't think people should feel uncomfortable with bringing those other two decks, they are very strong. I think Mono could have been put in Tier 1, but aside from that, I think the tiering is pretty accurate right now.

To be honest, BP07 is not the type of meta I like a lot. Generally, these types of formats are far too wide for their own good, and they create rough situations where you can get ruined by matchup variance. Power creep is much higher in this set, and there's a reliance on hitting specific card combos, which provide significant advantages. Examples include Pathfinder -> Pteradon or Mistolina + Princess Strike. It's sort of the problem that happened with Digital SV, where eventually you got so much card draw you were supposed to hit the combo most games, but if you simply didn't.... then you just lose and it's not even close.

It may also just be a bad feeling on my end, but the card prices don't seem too healthy right now either. As expected, Technolord and Viridia Magnas are much more expensive than the other legends, but 5 USD for the others seems very low. I wasn't under the impression that BP07 was a heavily sold out set like BP05, but perhaps I am overthinking it. Compared to BP06, it's quite surprising.

I also think it's a little concerning that Grand Showdown Gilnelese is selling for 800 USD, and Kuon has multiple confirmed sales at ~500 USD. In and of itself, the secondary market will do what it wants but it's a little rough when, in the case of BCS events, the travel cost will surpass the amount of money you can make, outside of winning the whole thing (and in the case of Kuon + Unsponsored invite, even if you win the whole thing).

Overall though, I don't think this is necessarily concerning for SVE as a whole, as I believe that it runs at a fairly low cost. The distribution networks and BCS events would exist irrespective of SVE (due to Vanguard/Weiss etc), and afaik, SVE product is print to order. In addition, with Worlds Beyond potentially coming out next year, it's unlikely it would be canned, if only due to optics. Perhaps the main factor is simply that they don't even need to spend money on developing the game, as the card sets were already developed in Japanese.

At some point in the future, I want to write an article about what I think is the most solid investment when it comes to SVE. And I use the term "investment" fairly loosely, haha.

In any case, see you guys next time, and as always, thanks for the support.