My Thoughts: The New Restriction List

Now that the new restrictions list for English has been finally released, I thought that it would be a good time to put in my opinions and thoughts on the new banlist. Time Leap took a hit and Seven Runner's now close to unplayable if things don't go right.

The New Changes to the Restriction List are as Follows:

Tick Tock Worker : Limited to one per deck and cannot be used as First Vanguard
Steam Battler, Ur-watar : One per deck
Seven Seas Apprentice, Nightrunner : One per deck and cannot be used as First Vanguard
Lizard Soldier Conroe : Loses his limited status and can be now be used as the First Vanguard

Onto the first offender:

Tick Tock is Person One of the Unholy Trinity that makes Gear Chronicle ridiculous. The official reasoning that Tick Tock was banned was that it allowed Gear Chronicle decks that ran him, namely Chronojet Time Leap, to top much to consistently. Obviously this was a good move, lowering the amount of leeway and potency that Time Leap decks are given. This won't make the deck that much weaker, however. Just look at Japanese format, they've been stuck with one Tick Tock Worker for the last 3 months yet Time Leap's still consistently topping. This is a step in a good direction, though, since it restricts how much a Time Leap player can use Tick Tock in a turn. It surprises me that Bushiroad didn't hit this earlier, but at least they did so in the end.


And now his partner in crime:

Ur-watar is Person Two in the Unholy Trinity and is the main plussing engine of the deck and has been limited to one per deck. Ur-watar provided a constant stream of drawing and hand filtering, as well as an easy outlet to toolbox Melem. The massive hand size made it truly oppressive to fight a Time Leap player, since you had to deal with a large hand size of 9+ after defending against a 6+ attack onslaught. It needed to be nefted, definitely.

But limiting it to one was the wrong way to do it.

A limit on the card does nothing against the deck. It's toolboxable by Melem, for one, so it doesn't hamper consistency and there's still an easy outlet to Melem with all the other G0s in the deck. Yes, you can lose your one Ur-Watar to the damage zone, but even then a heal gets it back easily. The only deck that I see this nerf weakening is Tiger, which loved having Ur-watars en-masse on the field for humongous draw power. This is honestly the most questionable ban that Bushi's given out and I really hope that they reconsider this later in the future.

Offender Three on the list is:

Nightrunner's not an incredibly horrible card by himself. Mill 4 cards from deck and call him from drop. Nothing too broken. It was a free plus one and provided Seven Seas with some much needed consistency in milling, without the need of going into Obadiah. Nothing crazy stupid like, Tick Tock right?

Wrong.

Nightrunner's existence, along with new Seven Seas support in GBT-08, led to the creation of Seven Runner, a 1-Stop Rush Deck that relied on using multiple Nightrunners to mill out the deck, adding much of your deck to the available toolbox, as well as free plus ones. The deck had ridiculous field scalability and massive plus, which I talked about here. The deck was ridiculously strong, locking your opponent out of massive power plays with strides, and with 12 Crit and Multiattacking most decks couldn't keep up. Two, yes, two of these 1-Stop Rush Decks made it to the top seats in World Championships(you can see these lists here). It was ridiculous, made the game excessively anti-fun, and deserved a hit. Seven Runner will still be playable, but massively weakened by less plus and less milling. The deck's more of a "get Nightrunner in Drop Zone or lose" deck now and hopefully will discourage similar decks in the future.

Now, away from the criminals and back to the redeemed freedman:

After one million years in dungeon Conroe is now back to legal status as the first vanguard. I think this is a great move. Kagero at the moment isn't exactly strong and this consistency boost can do great things for the deck.

Grade 1s are super important in Kagero and being able to search them out consistently again is just superb. Conroe, Aethonic, Perfect Guards, Bellog, Lava Flow, Nadel, and Gattling Claw are now all searchable. This can even let some super rogue decks like ReBirth rush and Cruel Dragon to become playable again. Conroe being off the bandits makes my heart flutter. It's not gonna be super impactful, but it will sure fix up Kagero's consistency issues.

Also makes Nouvelle relevant again, so good stuff uwu.

So there you have it. My thoughts on the new restriction list in English. Hope this gives you some insight on the state of the game. I really do hope these changes help to expand the meta and let us see some more decks outside of Time Leap and Seven Seas. With Seven Seas, especially, out of the meta we can see more GB Decks that weren't given much of a chance due to the nature of 1-Stop, like Viktor and Gaia, see play.

Anyhow, see you in the next one!

-Robot