Asian Championships Tournament Report by bbqgaming
Asian Championships Tournament Report by @BarbiecueDGG
The second ever Vibes TCG Asian Championships just concluded and I managed to go all the way and win it. @Oxtraxex who was pretty much my 'teammate' for this event and piloting a near identical deck, also reached the finals. We took the biggest risk in the whole field by playing an extremely powerful but also unproven archetype in red discard control and the result ended up being the best we could imagine. I'm sure that many members of the Vibes community are curious about I ended up on this deck list, how each of my games went and my post tournament thoughts on this deck. So I'm going to try to provide as much information as I can remember in this article and hopefully you guys will learn something
Pre Tournament Preparations
This tournament is different from all previous Vibes tournaments, as it is held right at the start of a brand new set release. It reminded me of the pro tours in MTG which happen near the start of a new expansion, and teams work extremely hard internally to crack their brains together and try to find a broken deck. So I knew that I needed to find someone who's also preparing for the Asian Championships to brainstorm about the new set together. Fortunately I have been talking to @Oxtraxex a lot this year and he has built many amazing decks in Vibes and naturally it made a lot of sense to discuss set 3 ideas with him. I was really excited for set 3 since we already had months without a new set and I was already trying to build some decks before the entire set was revealed. I also tried to make Vibes playable on TCG Arena and managed to come up with something that isn't ideal but works which helped me put a few crucial games in playing against myself, as well as a few games with trax. As for meta predictions, trax told me that it is likely that most established players would stick with their set 2 decks, which include purple relic recycler and bellyacher variants. There would also likely be many newer players who could be on yellow starter/budget decks. And of course Eton would be on bizbunk but we thought no one else would be (turns out another player did which made it only 2 total players on bizbunk) The initial deck that impressed me the most was a purple bellyacher deck. It's also one of the easier ones for me to build because we already have an existing proven bellyacher deck and I just had to start by replacing some cards with the overpowered set 3 purple characters and 4 afternoon breeze. I also made a green aggro deck that utilizes some of the vibe counter mechanics from set 3. I playtested both decks against each other on my own for a few games and the green deck got slaughtered by repeated removal. My early conclusion was that green's problems hasn't really been solved in set 3. It really needed something as powerful as check the yellow pages/penguin who might bring a plus one to keep up with removal heavy decks. So at this point I ruled out playing green for Asian Champs.
My very first iteration of a purple bellyacher deck. It focuses much more on the strong purple mechanics of set 3, mainly utilizing bellyacher as an icing mechanism.
Purple Bellyacher
Trax built a yellow/purple self ice deck on his own and he played 1 game against my purple bellyacher deck and he was already convinced how strong it is. He then gave me the idea of adding striker birb to abuse the 'on ice' benefits repeatedly and frankly that was genius. Striker birb + Iron Penguin is seriously a crazy combo. Bonus points if you could find a way to fit true form in. So I think at this point I was 90% sure about playing purple bellyacher. I also considered just playing a modified version of the caffeine juggling penguin deck (also built by trax) which I dominated online ranked with in the past few weeks (which to my surprise, no one actually played in the Asian Champs). My next task was supposedly to build a red list (since it obviously got strengthened a lot in set 3) but I was spending a lot of time sorting my vibes cards and preparing for the trip. I also thought that coming up with a working red list is a lot harder since it would be a brand new deck and there are too many ways to approach red. Even as late as 11 June I wasn't even considering playing red (I tested caffeine juggling at 10 June tournament at tactics)
Proof that red has always been on my mind lol, but unfortunately I didn't spend anytime on it earlier.
The Switch to Red & Getting to the Final List
One of my plans was actually to not reveal the deck I would ultimately play in the actual Asian Champs during any of the side events prior. So after the June 11 event at Tactics, I was thinking about what to try out on the June 12 event at cardpro. This was when I remembered about the meta prediction post @Chonker00 made 2 days earlier. He had a red list so I sleeved that on the night of 11 June in my hotel. At the same time I also sleeved a purple non bellyacher list which focuses much more on being a purple midrange deck. I literally played these 2 decks against each other, at 1am, by myself on my hotel bed like a freaking nerd (I was travelling here alone. Trax and I were supposed to meet in person at night to playtest but we were dead tired everytime after dinner). I was feeling confident with the purple deck as it drew multiple striker birbs and iron penguins. I believe iron penguin was iced almost 10 times in total, and it still lost to red. I was shocked lol. I think that one game alone lasted an hour but could be the most important hour of the week.
reporting to trax at 2am in the morning lmao
The first thing I noticed with Chonker's list was the absence of healthy push. I honestly thought he forgot about that card (he didn't, he just chose to omit it. I will talk more about this card later in the deck tech section, I think too many people are underestimating this card), so I added 3 to begin with. I also removed the 3 psychic birbs as they felt useless when there were no lil singers, and as a result I removed the lil singers as well. 2 on thin ice as the only removal is also an anomaly to me, I quickly went up to 4 on thin ice and added 2 lil daydreamers as bellyacher/other small characters removal. Which lead me to this list for the June 12 event:
Red V1
Red version 1 which I played at cardpro event on June 12
At the cardpro event, I lent trax the purple deck that I sleeved and coincidentally I was paired against him (sorry trax😂). It ended up being an extremely close game but I ultimately won. Round 2 was against Deuce who was probably on a similar deck that he chose to play at the Asian Champs. Removed every character that he played and won. Round 3 was against Waning who's on RP bashglobe without set 3 cards, which I also won for the 3-0 in that event. I wasn't happy with birb, stealth birb and not a rod anymore. Birb whiffs way too often in this list and is bad with popcorn. Stealth birb felt like it served no purpose in this deck. Not a rod anymore was almost never used during my games today because I simply never had to use it. As both birb and stealth birb are 2 drops, the logical replacement would be another 2 drop, or some 1 drops. There was only 2 left which I haven't tested: burglirb and unidentified flying birb. I tried to fit both in but it wasn't possible, so I went with unidentified flying birb which was what I felt was better. I also replaced lil daydreamer with sunburn a penguin because sunburn is just a better card with the same purpose in this deck(being able to hit peace out as well and other 4 vibe characters). I also decided to try out 1x utter mayhem for the June 13 side events (Having rodromancer gives you the luxury to play 1x tech red action cards imo) This was my version 2 of the list:
Red V2
2nd iteration of my list which I played on 13 Jun
At this point it was too late to switch back to purple for the 14 Jun main event, I was already spending a lot of time on refining the red deck, so at this point I was already 90+% sure about what I was going to play on Sunday.
On the final side event of the week at Toycon 13 June, I went 3-1. I think I beat 2 starter decks in the first 2 rounds, beat trax again, who's on sphinx, for the 3rd round and actually lost the red mirror to Deuce in the 4th round (he was playing quite a different list from mine, I believe it's more action heavy, not going to go into too much detail).
UFB was a monster, I think anyone who saw it in action knew within a few turns how busted it was. I also realized that I badly needed to draw rodromancer in my final game, so I went up to 4 copies. I didn't get to play utter mayhem, but trax reminded me that it could be fizzled quite easily, since it said 'choose a character'. It's also extremely tough to get 6 pudge. I quickly cut it as well as the birb of music with it. I also really wanted study all day so bad that I feel I need that 4th copy. And finally I also went up to 2 Binkus because it's actually quite good in this deck in general and absolutely hoses Eton bizbunk. I spent some time thinking of adding a payoff for all the fishsicles I'm producing, but ultimately decided that sacrificing consistency is not worth it for a potential win more, which finally led to my Asian Championships deck list.
Deck Tech & Explanations
My final 52 cards for the main event
Final Red
The main idea of this deck is to overwhelm your opponents with card advantage by repeatedly drawing cards, getting sheesh back from ice and discarding sheesh into the ice. These are supported by existing red powerhouses: Peace out Penguin & Popcorn Penguin to generate even more card advantage while nullifying your opponent's ability to develop their board. Also when coming up with this deck list I focused greatly on maximizing consistency and minimizing clunkiness, which is important in a 8/9 round swiss tournament.
4 Sheeeesh!: The reason why this deck is powerful. You really only need to draw 1 to get your engine going, but it's so important to draw it as early as possible that you simply have to play 4 copies. These also can be strategically rodded to be played when you need to flop one of your penguins to lose a vibe check, or flop a relaxing birb so that you can draw a card when you use chaos birb.
4 Healthy Push!: Not only is this the perfect way to counter Colosseum, but it is perfect with relaxing birb. Using this with relaxing birb to discard a sheeeesh! from your hand and draw a card is actually net +1 card advantage assuming you get the sheeeesh! back at some point. Using this aggressively in the early game is extremely underrated. The amount of times I saw my opponents stressed about deciding what to discard as early as turn 3 or 4 is a testament to the power of this play. Having 4 copies not only ensures that you draw it in time to deal with Colosseum/YumYum etc, but also increases the likelihood of using 2 at a time to ice the last 2 cards in their hand (which I have done a couple of times this tournament, to the devastation of my opponents). The amount of key cards I have discarded with healthy push is too much to count, in fact it even worked in my favor against bizbunk which is very counter-intuitive. I'm extremely delighted that this card was my set 3 spoiler, I instantly knew how good it was when I first saw it.
4 Chaos Birb: One of the main discard engines of the deck. Nothing gets better than a repeatable discard for only 2 fish. The main downside here is that it could help your opponent filter their draws, or even help your opponent advance their game plan (eg. bizbunk). One of the difficulties of playing this deck is to know when to stop activating it.
4 Unidentified Flying Birb: My MVP of the tournament. This card, like healthy push, was also criminally underrated by the community. I also ruled it out initially, thinking that fishsicles are not necessary in a deck like this. But I thought that it could help with rushing out an early Binkus/Bunkus, so why not try? Turns out it solves a very critical problem that many control decks in card games face: drawing too many cards but not having enough resources to play all of them to stabilize in time. It also gives you the ability to use saucy actions/rodromancer actions aggressively early without sacrificing development. This is kind of like the 'Layer Two Technology' of this deck.
4 Rodromancer: On the other hand, many thought that this is one of the best cards of the set and rightly so. It gives you so much freedom to rod important actions early while developing your board, and play them at a later stage of the game. If you understood why saucy actions are so good, you would easily appreciate the power of Rodromancer. Play 4 copies because you absolutely need to draw it at some point if you're rodding crucial actions aggressively.
4 Study All Day: The main card advantage action in this deck. It's not easy to find the right balance between card draw/filtering actions and removal. But 4 copies of this have obviously worked well for me today.
3 Relaxing Birb: Another MVP of the deck, this lets you draw an additional card off your study all day, healthy push and if you could find a way to flop it: chaos birb. Unfortunately you cannot have multiples of it in the huddle so I chose to play 3 copies. But moving forward, with more mirrors in future events, definitely up it to 4 because it can remove your opponent's relaxing birbs.
3 On Thin Ice: The best red removal printed so far by a mile. 3 pudge makes it very hard to use early on some crucial targets like bellyacher which is why I went with a 3-3 split between this and sunburn a penguin. You could definitely try to fit a 4th copy in depending on the meta. Just be careful not to rod all your actions and have nothing to reveal to play on thin ice at a crucial moment.
2 Hammer Rod: Best relic removal printed so far. We still need to respect Colosseum and other important relics like Sphinx and opposing inspiring stories.
4 Peace Out Penguin, 3 Popcorn Penguin: Two of the best cards in the entire Vibes cardpool. Serves the same purpose as in the old RP control/midrange decks. Including these is disciplined deckbuilding.
3 Inspiring Story: Good with popcorn, also good for winning vibe checks late game and super strong against big ben. Like popcorn, including this is also disciplined deckbuilding. It's important to respect the presence of yellow decks in a field like this.
3 Mount Fuji: Must have against GMP, good against bizbunk too and other specific situations.
3 Sunburn a Penguin: necessary 2 pudge way to ice something early, such as a bellyacher. Also super good as a response to adventure squad (Sorry @etondelmoro 😂).
1 Hit the High note: I think I almost never had a chance to play this during the tournament, so not sure about it. It would be super good to find it when colosseum is in play for sure, but healthy push handled all the colosseums in this tournament.
2 Binkus: A nod to bizbunk, but this is also very good in the mirror to get rid of opponen't sheeeesh from ice, and it is also a large threat in the final stages
1 Bunkus: Similar logic, good against mill and also a threat in the late game.
Cards that did not make the cut
Good Vibes Only: The other very powerful card draw action from set 3. The reason I chose Study All Day over this is mainly just to make decision making easier, as Good Vibes Only can get awkward if you have no Sheeeesh! in hand. Obviously if you're adding more card draw actions to this deck this is going to be the next one added in after Study All Day. Though I must note that this is insane with Again, Again in a different approach to the red deck (spend 2 cards to discard 2, draw 6, for net +2, +4 if discarding 2 Sheeeesh!).
Characters that gain vibe counters on discard (eg. Stealth Birb, Toasting Birb): As I said earlier, I felt that Stealth Birb did not accomplish anything for me and I was focusing on maximizing consistency. Sure, these could become threats at the closing stages if unanswered, but for every copy of these included in the deck you sacrifice a slot for a card that could make an instant impact (eg. chaos birb, UFB, rodromancer).
Big payoff cards (eg. window-shopping birb, sir vibesalil): This is something that I'm unsure about. I was spending the final hours before the tournament thinking about a way to utilize all the fishsicles generated, and I just couldn't think of what to cut from my deck. It would be nice to have more ways to close out the game in some awkward situations. While adding these could add to the ceiling and power level of the deck, it hurts consistency so I ended up just forgoing it completely as I already know that this deck could win without big payoff cards, since it already has a bunch of pudge producers which act as win conditions in the late game.
Orrin, Forest Guardian: Unfortunately I did not get to playtest with this card, but it could be nuts in this deck and it is obviously very powerful in a slower and more well defined meta.
Round by Round Report
Here it is with each round as its own paragraph. When you paste this into Contentful, use full paragraph breaks (the blank line between each round) so they survive publishing.
Rd 1 vs Yellow YumYum: Unfortunately I don't remember much of the details from this game but I managed to prevent him from ever getting a chance to play Yum Yum and likely controlled the game with popcorn. 1-0
Rd 2 vs RP Tower: I remember he was reading every card I had from set 3 with a flash light because of the poor lighting at that side of the room 😂 I think I got my sheeeesh engine online early on and won the game by card advantage. 2-0
Rd 3 vs Yellow YumYum: My first game at the feature table of the day. For almost the entire game I was in control with popcorn and even had a peace out on the board, but I mistakenly not used the peace out early enough and let him get to 5 pudge to play yum yum which left me with just 3 rods lol. Fortunately because of the card advantage gained earlier, I was still able to get popcorn + inspiring post yum yum and close out the game. 3-0
Rd 4 vs Sheeeesh Control (maplepls): Fortunately I knew about what deck he played before the round started which helped with my mulligan decisions. This is a matchup I dreaded because I think drop of attention is quite good against me, and he has sheeeesh in his deck as well. Early on I drew a hammer rod and instantly used it on his potion commotion, which left him stuck on only 1 potion commotion for the rest of the game, which made it harder for him to play drop of attention. I was trying to play around drop of attention the whole game by holding some character cards in hand because from my experience the drop of attention is inevitable (I've played with drop of attention countless times myself). Eventually I got to 14 permanents and he had a simon smasher and potion commotion in play, with 1 overwhelm with knowledge in his ice. He started action time by flopping the potion commotion to play overwhelm with knowledge. This means that the only pudge he has left to play drop of attention is that simon smasher. It was then clear to me what his plan was, to resolve the OWK and play 2 more OWKs from the ice before playing drop. Therefore I used a removal on his simon smasher while the OWK was on the stack to completely prevent him from playing drop that turn which won me the game. 4-0
Rd 5 vs GMP caffeine colosseum (@notPiccaboo): He had quite a slow start, his first play was a too much caffeine on turn 2 to flop my chaos birb. Eventually he got a GMP and I found a fuji to name the GMP. I think healthy push was the MVP here and discarded his colosseum at some point (He said he should have played around it). Ultimately I won by having too many characters and an unanswered fuji. 5-0
Rd 6 vs Bizbunk (@etondelmoro): I thought my fairytale run would have ended here. I haven't playtested against Bizbunk at all with this deck. Fortunately for me, he was also unprepared for the matchup and he doesn't know my exact list, including the type of removal I was playing. For me the plan was simple, to draw a Binkus and win with it, or at least draw a fuji to buy some time. But I was unable to find either for the entire game, despite popcorn buying me a lot of time. Ultimately I even had to play popcorn onto a completely empty board to try and buy another turn to draw the binkus. On that same turn, he decided to try and go for the win, and ended up with 4 Bunkus in the huddle after a long turn, with 3 cards in his deck (which were all bizmos) and he proceeded to action time. I iced his ascending penguin with the popcorn and then spent a couple of minutes thinking about how the different scenarios that can happen. I knew that he's definitely winning the vibe check, has a penguin who's ok, and 3 cards in his deck. I figured that after he wins the vibe check, that's 2 cards left, and then on his turn he draws 1 card, and mills the last with the penguin who's ok before playing Bizmo to win. After figuring this out, I played my sunburn a penguin on his penguin who's ok, and he conceded. In fact because I had a chaos birb in the huddle at that point, he could not play around any removal. It was a super crazy game and perhaps my craziest win against bizbunk ever. 6-0
Rd 7 vs Yellow YumYum: My 2nd feature table match of the day, fortunately this one went more smoothly than my previous feature match. Once again popcorn proved to be a powerhouse in this matchup. There was a point in the game where he played a check the yellow pages with 2 cards left in his hand and I went ahead to play 2 healthy pushes to get rid of the yum yum on his hand and I closed out the game soon after that. 7-0
Rd 8 vs Bellyacher Colosseum: At this point the pressure has eased a lot because I'm locked for top 8. I believe my opponent missed a 1 drop before playing a lil with balloon, which was really good for me. Unfortunately I don't remember the other details of the game. 8-0
Rd 9 vs RP Bashglobe (Waning): This game really thought me a lot about how to approach snowglobe decks. My strategy with rodromancer is to rod some actions to play them later in the game. Well that plan is destroyed when my opponent plays snowglobe 😂. Couldn't answer both of his threats despite having card advantage and finally lost. 8-1
QF vs blue bellyacher (lowkey): The game started with 2 minutes for both of us to look at each other's decklist, my opponent hilariously said that he doesn't recognize half the cards in my deck 😂 Another advantage of playing with set 3 cards. Penguin who's ok was a problematic card in this matchup, but I was fortunate to draw 2 sunburn a penguins to deal with penguin who's ok and lil bellyacher before things spiral out of control, and controlled the first game with popcorn. In the 2nd game I think I made a small mistake, he used a lil daydreamer to ice my popcorn and I attempted to spend an action to remove his lil daydreamer. In that process he was able to get an activation on one of his 2 bellyachers. I should have been patient and let my popcorn get iced. Ultimately my opponent made another mistake as well, getting a lil lookout instead of another bellyacher even though I already had a hammer rod in my rods. I ended up discarding his colosseum with healthy push the following turn anyway. Closed out the game after that.
SF vs bizbunk (Eton): The dreaded rematch vs bizbunk. But these 2 games were less eventful than the game during the swiss. Fortunately both games I was able to draw binkus and this matchup certainly becomes much more manageable with a binkus. Penguin who breaks the fourth wall is a large recurring threat though, which forced me in both games to use removal on them, win the vibe check, and use binkus to put all of them below my opponent's deck. One thing to note, the commentators were suggesting that I keep my Binkus alive by leaving one character in my opponent's ice. But actually against Bizbunk, the ability to be able to play Binkus at any time is much more important, so you always want it in the ice.
Finals Red mirror (@Oxtraxex): Finally my first red mirror of the entire tournament, and extremely happy that it's in the finals. Inspiring story was the MVP in both games, nullifying sunburn a penguin. In game 1, Trax played a hammer rod face up very early on, losing a lot of tempo and gave me an advantage. Soon after I was able to play popcorn + inspiring story to dominate the board and put me further ahead and close out the game. In game 2, I actually had a strong hand and decided to keep my entire hand, but things turned when my relaxing birb got removed by his relaxing birb (my first time the entire tournament). Fortunately I had 2 inspiring stories which proved to be very crucial in the mid game as they served as protection for my popcorn and peace outs. Game actually ended being a binkus mirror and I was finally able to draw the removal needed at the end to ice his binkus and win the tournament.
Conclusion
First of all I want to thank everyone who has helped made this event possible, the @Ocapgames team, @phtoycon as well as @TacticsPH and cardpro for providing set 3 singles and products. And people who have helped me in some way to arrive at this deck, notably @Oxtraxex and @Chonker00. This deck is definitely not easy to play and can be overwhelming for a beginner, but I think it is a very rewarding deck to learn as it teaches a lot about card advantage, remembering triggers and lots of other aspects of the game. I think moving forward this deck will likely evolve into something stronger, perhaps with a second color. I think there are also tons of other decks that are waiting to be discovered which could be even stronger than this. So I can't wait to see the meta at the European Championships. Finally, a big thank you for taking the time to read this article. If you have any questions about the deck, let me know in the comments!
For more content like this, follow bbqgaming at @BarbiecueDGG