This ban might hurt some mill\stall decks but Zoroark-Gx decks are still op. It is a small step in the right direction but this does not make expanded much different than what it currently is.
Lusamine and Delinquent Banned from Expanded!
- Thread starter Water Pokémon Master
- Start date
i have been playing expanded stall for a while now and i can say these bans dont hurt stall that much because zoroark decks play very little amounts of energy.
555-come-on-now...expanded is supposed to be broken, thats its allure
If stall is degenerate then so is aggro and control and any other way to play the game to get to some kind of win condition.
man i was running that very combo (except i used that discard supporter spray instead of peeking) in standard last year. i guess expanded does make it more degenerate.
I'm going to disagree with both of you, which probably isn't much of a surprise given my tendencies. ^^' I'll explain why this isn't just ol' Otaku being antagonistic or playing Devil's Advocate.
First are we talking about "stall" or "slow play". Stall is a legitimate tactic, a form of control. Slow play is excessively milking the clock. Yes, "excessively"; if you can carry out enough actions in the time allowed to eat up the clock and ultimately win, I may not like it but it is still a legitimate win.Assuming this wasn't the old "Stall versus Slow Play" misunderstanding:
It isn't specifically a deck's win condition, but how it achieves that condition. The powers-that-be are primarily concerned with
- Player 1 locking down a major mechanic before Player 2 ever gets the chance to use it, be it evolving, Item usage, etc.
- Things that make tournament play more difficult from an organizational standpoint, like making things time consuming.
- Things that run contrary to the intent of tournament play, like primarily "luck" based combos or decks that can win enough to significantly shift outcomes.
As a player, I also do not like it when
- The game becomes Poké-Solitaire, whether because I literally can do nothing or what I can do has been rendered meaningless.
- The game disproportionately rewards skill and luck (namely, favoring the latter over the former).
Edit: Due avoid some confusion, I added "primarily" as a qualify to "luck". All Pokémon TCG decks involve multiple elements of luck; the sentence above is referring to things that have already caused cards to be banned like Shiftry (NXD) (later Forest of Giant Plants) or Unown DAMAGE FTW decks.
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I will walk away from a table if someone is playing stall. Mill I have no issues with because at least there is some chance for interaction. I would rather lose to an FTK type deck if I had my choice. Less time wasted.
And it still will be. But now, the game can be played instead slowly being shut out, which Lusamine did, or by having no cards T1, which Delinquent did. The game will just be playable in most stages for most decks.
As Otaku said, anything can be degenerate. The question is: What is degenerate? I would argue that LST was degenerate, but at the same time, I would argue that Night March in States 2016 season was degenerate. I would also argue that Delinquent and Lusamine are degenerate. No one wants to play games that have infinite loops, but essentially no win condition, and no one wants to play a game from 1 probably bad card. More than that, people play expanded to play Pokemon, and I would argue that 1 of these cards prevented that, and the other made it a bad experience.
I'm going to disagree with both of you, which probably isn't much of a surprise given my tendencies. ^^' I'll explain why this isn't just ol' Otaku being antagonistic or playing Devil's Advocate.
Assuming this wasn't the old "Stall versus Slow Play" misunderstanding:
It isn't specifically a deck's win condition, but how it achieves that condition. The powers-that-be are primarily concerned with
Whether trying to win via Knock Outs, Bench Out, Deck Out, etc. if it avoids those, the powers-that-be won't take issue with it.
- Player 1 locking down a major mechanic before Player 2 ever gets the chance to use it, be it evolving, Item usage, etc.
- Things that make tournament play more difficult from an organizational standpoint, like making things time consuming.
- Things that run contrary to the intent of tournament play, like "luck" based combos or decks that can win enough to significantly shift outcomes.
As a player, I also do not like it when
In the vein of "degenerate play styles", I assert that your typical beatdown deck becomes "degenerate" when it scores KO's in a manner that your opponent may as well not even still be playing, even with a competitive deck and competitive level of skill. Stall decks do have a greater risk of becoming degenerate, in my view. Not all stall decks, but those where it pretty much becomes a game of solitaire or who-can-draw-what-they-need-at-the-right-time. I cannot prove such a thing, nor would it surprise me to be mistaken and for steamroller-style KO decks to actually be the more degenerate issue. The big question is "What is worse: losing slowly with a remote chance of turning things around or losing quickly, even if you have almost no chance of turning it around?"
- The game becomes Poké-Solitaire, whether because I literally can do nothing or what I can do has been rendered meaningless.
- The game disproportionately rewards skill and luck (namely, favoring the latter over the former).
So you are saying is that any gimmick decks that use luck(sleep based deck) or actual stall decks are going to get banned the moment someone makes it work at a high level of play. because those types of decks meet point 2 and 3 of your how it achieves that condition. If so why not just tell just players that want to play those kinds of decks to bluntly fudge off?
I enjoy decks that stop aggro players from setting up or even stop them from attacking, I don't like doing the prize trade.
Not necessarily. Wailord has survived for 4 years with varying levels of success. Wailord is a fair stall deck that could only do 1 thing: inifinitely loop Lusamine. Let's look at the far more egregious example: Zoroark-GX/Seismitoad-EX. While Wailord is fair by just having a bunch of HP to go through, ZoroToad Item locks, Lusamine loops, and can still draw up to 8 cards a turn for free (via Exeggcute).
Also, have you ever considered how stopping an aggro player from setting up makes it feels? Let's take a look at Lost March vs. Trevenant in Expanded. If Wally were still playable, this would be a loss every single time for Lost March. I would estimate it to be no better than 5/95 for Lost March. And having MUs that are that polar is typically considered bad. In the current state of these decks, it seems maybe a 60/40 in favor of Lost March. It is a fair Match-up that is not majorly swayed either way.
PS: Have you ever heard of The Truth? You would probably enjoy it.
Then why haven't they banned exeggcute for such toxic looping?
I never really cared cause I hated playing against aggro decks cause you either play their game of getting the prize trade in your favor, or you slow them down, and well I again don't enjoy prize trading
You make it sound like losing Lost March would be a bad thing. I have seen that deck kill entire leagues by making players not want to show up....
What loop does it create? If you are talking about Propagate Exeggcute, It is just an enabler for Zoroark, which would still be broken without Exeggcute.
I'm not quite sure how to respond to this... you basically just said that you only care about yourself when you play against something you don't like...
I don't believe that statement. If Lost March is killing Leagues, then why does it have hardly any SPE/Regionals/Internats performances? Either way, social pressure SHOULD keep people in aleague from playing that if it is so unfair.
It is still a loop, that basically nullifies the downsides of some cards like ultra ball. Like Lusamine allows the retrieval of supporters including her self, yes there is a loop but she alone does not allow infinite plays of the same supporter on the same turn.
Oh the irony cause that is exactly what people are saying to justify all the dumb bans. They don't care the person is having fun only that they are not and now some people are not having fun and they are....
My mistake I was thinking night march, and you would think social pressure should keep the league going but people just get fed up and instead of putting social pressure on them they just stop showing up or complain in the facebook group or message me to try and make things better... (then I get told in pokegym and the like that I shouldn't fix things and those players shouldn't be playing...)
Exeggcute doesn't break Ultra Ball, it just make Ultra Ball better. And Lusamine isn't a 1 turn infinite loop, but it is an infinite loop, and in the case of ZoroToad and many Expanded stall decks, the number of turns needed to execute an infinite loop does not matter.
In proper game design, all strategies should have some viable form to work, and most MUs and games should fall close to 50/50. (By 50/50, I mean at almost any point in the game.) In this way, players can have fun with any strategy. A ban is essentially TPCi admitting that they messed up, and one way to play the game is far too dominant. For these nerfs, control decks got hit, but in the last, Aggro decks arguably got hit the hardest by losing Puzzle of Time.
I was just throwing out the idealistic approach.
Re-reading my previous comment, I assume you're referring to this
Let me stress, I am talking about decks that win primarily due to luck, not which involve elements of chance. I guess I should have stressed that more, but context really does point to that given all decks (winning or otherwise) have a significant amount of luck to them due to the fundamental nature of the Pokémon TCG. Still, I shall edit the comment, to help clarify I was discussing decks like Shiftry (NXD) backed by Forest of Giant Plants, or the more recent Unown DAMAGE decks that can win on a player's first turn.
The emphasized text could use some clarification. I don't like that the game has gotten to a point where it is mostly 2HKO's and OHKO's; even ignoring personal preference, such environments tend to cause balance issues with game mechanics. I still can enjoy decks that involve my Pokémon KOing and being KO'd each turn, however. My question is, do you enjoy winning specifically because you're punishing your opponent for... well... playing the game? Or because you're finding a different way to win?
For the record, I used to take great pleasure in finding lock decks that would leave my opponent helpless. Then a friend pointed out how I was being such a hypocrite as I hated being on the receiving end of such things, whether through a lock or through a brute force attack. Until that point, I'd thought of this TCG only in terms of how I could enjoy it, not how others could enjoy it.
There is a difference between winning through an overwhelming offense that effectively stops your opponent from setting up or pursuing their win condition versus one where your opponent is still able to play and enjoy the game, even if they lose.
There is a difference between winning through a lock or similar tactic that that effectively stops your opponent from setting up or pursuing their win condition versus one where your opponent is still able to play and enjoy the game, even if they lose.
There is a difference between winning through am alternate win in a single turn early game, which stops your opponent from setting up or pursuing their win condition versus one where your opponent is still able to play and enjoy the game, even if they lose.
Are you sure you fully understand why certain cards are banned? If you do, good, but a lot of people, whether they agree or disagree with the Ban List, do not understand. Let us use Archeops (NVI, DEX) as an example. Archeops was originally banned because stereotypical beatdown decks running few or no Evolutions were including Archeops and reliably playing it on their first turn via Maxie's Hidden Ball Trick, which meant any deck focused on manually Evolving Pokémon was pretty screwed.With Maxie's Hidden Ball Trick banned, at first I thought Archeops could be removed from the Ban List... then I remembered it was a Stage 1 Pokémon and you cannot manually evolve anything until a player's second turn. Which means Player 1 can still lock out Player 2 from manually Evolving before they've had a single turn where they could manually evolve. Ditto {*} makes this a two-card combo most decks could at least consider. Even going with Archen, Archeops just hits the field a turn too soon for good game balance.
A lot of us do have to work to approach the game from the point of view where it isn't what we want just for ourselves but what appeals to the most players while keeping Pokémon as Pokémon. My general view is that the fundamental game mechanics need to function properly, with no one Type or Stage or whatever majorly outperforming the others... and both players should have a reasonable chance to enjoy playing, regardless of which one wins or loses.
Sorry for the length.
A healthy expanded format is a format that sees a wide array of decks being played. When a deck (or a card) majorly outperforms, it limits diversity and options and creates a bad game environment.
awwh sad. i come back after a few months of having no time for the game, only to discover i cant use the 2 full art lusamine i got before i had to take a break (both on and offline)... awh man i liked those cards and ran them in all my decks (ive so far only played theme and expanded)
People keep asking at tournaments when I do use it in standard. "I thought that was banned?" "Only in expanded". Will be nice to have around for another year, if I can make a decent stall list to use it in.
Yeah... true. But I've never played Standard, as I don't like to be restricted too much in using the cards I like. Oh, the irony here....For the record, you can still use your Lusamine in Standard, even post-rotation due to the Full Art Lusamine from Ultra Prism.
...
Yeah, that second Full Art is what should probably sting more.