Another community tournament was held yesterday with results that roughly align with the first community tournament. Salad won the whole tournament, and Subterror appears to have had the best conversion rate into Top 8. Nothing much to add about either of those decks save that they remain strong options. Here are the breakdowns for deck entries overall and Top 8:
Still, despite ending in an expected manner, there were a few surprises. A normal pend deck - largely considered one of the worst decks in the core set - managed to sneak its way into Top 8. Props to the pilot for taking the deck that far. The list is below. I'm particularly interested in the inclusion of Lose One Turn, which is an impactful sort-of-floodgate but can only be activated if you don't control any special summoned monsters. The pilot must have found the card strong enough and easy enough to play around to make it worth including despite the pend summon game plan.
Last and not least we have the second place deck: Blue-Eyes. My (completely biased) opinion is that Blue-Eyes is the most interesting deck in the format because it has not been solved to the same degree as other options. Things like ratios (how many polys and/or Abyss do you run?), generic inclusions (does Gizmek belong in this deck?), and even complete engines (since there are so many tuners, is it worth running a Junk Converter package?) vary widely between builds. And as far as I can tell, there is not a single definitive list as of yet.
The second place pilot's deck is below. It's a straightforward list with no gimmicks, but there are still a few choices to talk about. The pilot chose to include two Abyss and two poly, demonstrating how important access to Tyrant is and perhaps showing confidence that the deck is consistent enough to get to two Abyss over the course of a game (and can survive seeing one in the opening hand). Two White Stone of Legend gives you more chances to add vanilla Blue-Eyes to your hand immediately - again, a possible sign that access to Tyrant is a main priority. Finally, there is only 1 Veiler in the main. Blue-Eyes is essentially the only deck that can potentially run this small amount of Veiler because Sage with Eyes of Blue searches any lvl 1 Light Tuner. Interestingly, the pilot mentioned on the Rotation Format discord that Veiler was not good, and might be cut in a future list.
That's all for now! I'm really loving doing these personal breakdowns. They don't have anything that isn't already in the discord, but it makes me study tournament results more closely and hopefully will improve my format knowledge.