17/05/2015

The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance?

Malaysia’s Asia Championship Qualifiers 2015 is happening this weekend and I scrubbed Round 1 of Single Elimination. This is going to be one short post but no ranting. It’s obviously salty to have your goals scratched out by reality as early as the first round however any competitive YGO player understands the potential risk of dropping out early. Regardless, how well you have prepared yourself. It wasn’t a total waste of a day since I managed to grab some tasty loots and having a few laughs with distant friends is always a good way to grind off any sort of bad aftertaste. Here’s how my match went:

ROUND 1 (YANG ZING)

Game 1: Opponent went first and set three cards and ended. I opened with Goblindbergh, A Hero Lives, Mystical Space Typhoon x2, Fiendish Chain, and drew an E-Emergency Call. Made my move with AHL into Stratos but was met with Skill Drain which of course I replied with MST and my opponent flipped a second copy which caught me by surprise. No brainer, second copy of MST happened and here’s the great twist; he flipped a third copy of Skill Drain on me and I died from there. Damn…

Game 2: I went first but my nigga Dark Law wasn’t around to bring the heat. Game progressed into a grindy pace but I was eventually able to play Dimensional Fissure effectively disabling his monster’s abilities together with that broken spawn-spam-splash trap card Yang Zing has.

Game 3: Dude set a few cards and ended. I did practically the same thing since the only relevant cards I had at that moment was Vanity’s Emptiness and Compulsory Evacuation Device which was quickly rendered useless by Harpie’s Feather Duster. Skill Drain happened again but MST solved the first copy. No action for me because a second piece of IMBA cardboard named Skill Drain practically broke the game for me. Eventually, I tried a few comeback plays with Summoner Monk (Lance-ed it) into Shadow Mist flipping it down with Book of Moon for Mask Change. But it was all pointless. My opponent’s back-rows consist of Mistake, Skill Drain, Imperial Iron Wall, and a set Torrential Tribute.

Being a sore loser is part of improving (not the kind that blames everything on someone else or luck.) Re-evaluating factors and decisions is the best way to move on from a defeat, learning from defeat as they say. I examined the match in my head over and over again but couldn’t move on from the first game where a play-set of Skill Drains murdered me. Was it a mistake or just balls? That decision brought first blood for my opponent, I am not here to diss or rant, having said that, again I pondered on the argument whether it was a misplay which went unpunished or was it pure instinctive guts crafting a high risk-high return tactic? It was a bad beat without a doubt but what happened really got my mind going places thus why I chose to name this post The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance? I have no answer for that situation at the moment. What do you think? Thanks for reading!