23 results for: culture
Friday Flyer #8: A Dearth of Remaining Expanded Puns, Commentary on the Expanded Format, and Mailbag “Hello again everyone! It’s been another exciting week of talking Expanded here on SixPrizes, with a trio of articles looking at some decks in the format. As I alluded in the Tweet on Mike Fouchet’s article yesterday, it’s a format that’s personally starting to feel a bit overwhelming—and if I’m feeling overwhelmed having played the whole time these cards have been legal, I imagine it’s a messier place yet for players newer to the scene. I hope we’ve helped players in spots like that make some progress toward understanding, but it’s admittedly a bit difficult with this much uncertainty. It could…
Friday Flyer #7: A Few More Expanded Notes and Nuggets “Hello everyone! Another week down, and this time, we moved thoroughly into the Expanded frontier. Travis, Pablo, and I had a trio of articles going into the larger format as we evolve past the bans it received this summer. It’s going to be an interesting format, and I’m curious to see what works out from here. Next week, I’ll do the October mailbag, so if you have any Pokemon questions for my address next week, feel free to drop them my way. I’ll Tweet out some reminders throughout the week, and try to fit them into the articles where I…
Friday Flyer #6: A Look at Tournament Play Best Practices “When I started this idea of a column a few weeks ago, I planned to hit on Expanded a pretty great deal in this early portion. As it happens, that has turned out to be a bit of a miss—other stuff has been more important, it’s been unavoidable that I talk about Standard, whatever may be. As it happens, October’s scheduling puts us in another spot where I’d have initially discussed Expanded today, but believe the better use of time will instead be to concentrate those efforts on my Tuesday article—there may be some Standard stuff I mix in there,…
Friday Flyer #5: The Inaugural Mailbag Edition “Welcome back, everyone! I hope you’re enjoying this way of wrapping up the week—I’ve enjoyed writing them, if nothing else. As always, feel free to drop any feedback my way. I’m going to keep the intro short today, as we’re going to go through the questions submitted to me over the last few days. A few questions weren’t fit for this format—a few were just trolls, too—but I’m going to cover what I can in this space. From a programming perspective, Alex, Isaiah, and Xander will have the last competitive words before Memphis and I’ll probably cover Expanded a touch…
A Grimer (Primer!) on Competitive Pokémon TCG Play “So you’ve got the right behaviours, but what do you do with them? Before you dive in and start doing things for their own sake, it’s worth understanding the structure you play within. If your goal is to earn a day 1 invitation, what threshold do you need to reach, and how should you approach it? Using the 2017/2018 season, you would have needed 400 points in North America. The season is divided in 4 Quarters, which each had a best finish limit of 100CP at local events with uncapped Regionals/SPE/Internationals. Much derided for the ability to “just win 8…
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Using the braids on its head, it pummels foes to get them to quiet down. One blow from those braids would knock out a professional boxer. (Hattrem)
A Look Back at a Year of Junior Competition, NAIC Nuggets, and Poképarent Open Profile “The 2018 Championship Series saw only slight increases in attendance at the Regional level, but the number of Worlds qualifiers in North America doubled from 66 last year to 126 this year. The lowering of the invite threshold to 350 CP, guaranteed Top 4 points at League Cups, and four quarters of Cups put an invite within reach of many more players this year. For reference, though, 126 invites is still lower than 2015 (157) and 2016 (154), which had a very different series structure known for City, State, and National Championships. An increasing number of invites means more competitors…
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The US+CA Delegation to the 2018 World Championships by the Numbers “This year started off with a few interesting announcements: a relatively low CP bar for Day 1 (compared to historical barometers) and the removal of the best finish limit for Regional Championships. With the low bar came a new set of incentives for chasing the Day 2 bye, which I’ve blogged about, and a new set of players who saw their first Day 1 invite on the horizon. The removal of the best finish limit only created a perception that Day 2 would be harder, which set this race up to be even crazier than last year. I’ve argued extensively…
Christopher’s Data Dissertation on the 2017/18 NA Masters’ TCG Regional Championships “A few key issues and trends have emerged this year that seem worth exploring: Location shifts. We saw Philly vanish; Hartford replace. We saw Seattle “move” to Vancouver. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m pretty interested in seeing how attendance moved along with those events. On the whole: growth! For the second year in a row, the circuit seems to have grown substantially. With all but 3 events beating their prior year’s overall attendance number, for many, it was a successful year. But, about those 3…Expanded as a common thread? Roanoke, Costa Mesa, and Salt Lake City were the 3 events that did…
On Best Finish Limits and Barometers of “Best” in the Pokémon TCG Championship Series “Now, from the top, I want to be clear: I do not aim to take a position, nor do I personally really have a position, on whether it is “right” that a player earn an invitation to the World Championships one way or another. I do strongly believe that the people crowing it’s “beneficial to good players to have more (worse) players on Day 1” are naive in their evaluation—if you told me I needed to go 4-2 against 6 of the 54 Day 2 invitees we’ll have this year or 7-2 against the field of Day 1 invitees we’ll have…
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In Pursuit of an the Ideal Worlds Invite Structure and Making Malamar for Madison “When announced this year, public enemy #1 of the 400 CP structure was undoubtedly the fact that any given player could qualify entirely by winning League Cups. Easier said than done, of course, and to my knowledge, there are precisely zero players that have achieved such a feat this year. That in and of itself should speak volumes for how League Cups were really not the main problem with the structure this year. I have very mixed feelings about League Cups as a concept and certainly would be in favor of seeming them go away or be lowered in priority in…
With jaws that can shear through steel rods, this highly aggressive Pokémon chomps down on its unfortunate prey. (Drednaw)
Buzzwole/Lycanroc @ São Paulo, Tournament Takeaways, and Evolution in Penalty Process “I’m going to start off looking at my personal run in the tournament this weekend, then later get into some of the stickier more judge-side issues that players should be aware of and consider heading into future events. Going into this event, the most important goal was simply to earn some points to keep pace in the Top 16 race (we could discuss all day the health of making that decision over considering the goal to simply be winning the tournament, but I’ll just pass on that). With that in mind, riskier plays like Greninja BREAK, Tapu Bulu-GX/Vikavolt, and any crazy…
A Partway Look at the 2018 North American Circuit by the Numbers “Personally, a big mystery in the recent growth of the game has been trying to analyze whether there are materially more players involved in the game or whether we’re simply seeing the same players attend more tournaments. This section will try to deal with that question, among other things. The following two paragraphs, and table following, summarize all of the findings I made in this respect. Afterwards, there’s further analysis and a bit more breakdown by Regional. At least 4990 unique Masters Division players have entered 11 TCG Regionals in North America this year—a total of 8125 event entries, for an…
Kenny’s Look at All Aspects of Casting Competitive Pokémon TCG “The number one question I get asked is how to break into commentating. Assuming that your goals are to some day commentate official events for TPCi (which, again, I do not represent in any way), I think you would be well served to look at how each of the current North American casters have broken in: grassroots commentary. Not to say that breaking into grassroots commentary is easy. I’m actually pretty lucky (in almost all aspects of life, really, but that’s an article for another day) in that I was noticed (along with Jeremy) for our YouTube channel (RIP), and…
One Family’s 2017-18 Season So Far and a Look at the Makeup of Junior Top 16 “Initially, the 2016-17 invite CP Requirement for Juniors was set high at 400 CP. With only 3 quarters of League Cups accounting for a maximum of 300 CP, a Junior had to make Top 8 at a Regional or place at an International to get an invite. Fortunately, TPCI adjusted the requirements midway through the year, lowering the threshold to 350 CP and slightly bumping up the points earned at different events. This allowed more Juniors to make Worlds and relieved the pressure to have to place at a major tournament or have no chance of getting an invite. Fast…
Kenny Wisdom on the Community and What You Can Do About It “Before we get started, I want to make one thing very clear: I am the author of this article because my position of influence allows me to reach the widest number of people, but ultimately, I could not and would not write this independently. The things I’m about to say, the experiences I’m going to share, and the solutions I’m going to offer have all been shared with me and suggested by women. Listening to affected groups about the things that affect them is a big part of what this article is about, but we’ll get to that later. For…
On days when blizzards blow through, it comes down to where people live. It stashes food in the snowball on its head, taking it home for later. (Galarian Darmanitan)
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