A History of Bushiroad's Vanguard World Championships

Every single year, world finals happens.  Every single year, people whine about the fact that the meta deck always wins.  That bad players top.  That Vanguard isn't competitive.  That they're quitting the game.  But, every single year, everyone seems to forget that the exact same thing happened the year before.  But, what people don't seem to realize is, if a non-meta deck tops, the game isn't competitive because someone sacked with a non-meta deck and happened to win.

This year, we had an exceptional amount of players attending worlds that either maliciously or unknowingly cheated.  Like, just about all of them.  This, honestly, isn't wildly different from any other Vanguard Championship Circuit, outside of the staff being more incompetent than normal and the stream doing the rulings for them.  It sucks when the judges aren't paying attention and things like this slip under the radar.  With the loss of exceptional staff members like JD Mercado, it seems that Bushiroad can't ensure the integrity of the game.  But enough about that, let's talk about the history of Vanguard World Championships.

2012 World Championships.

Brandon Smith (Spectral Duke Dragon) vs. Henry Suharto (Pellinore/Garmore)

Brandon expended a counterblast on Sleygal Dagger to make a 9k booster behind his Gigantech Destroyer to make a 21k row.  Against a 9k Vanguard.

Henry called a Flame of Victory behind his 10k base Pellinore to attack a 10k base Spectral Duke Dragon, then subsequently lost because he didn't have shield.  No, he didn't send it to the bottom of the deck with Pellinore to actually make a stage, either.

This was the first example of a World Championship that we had.  Both players misplayed, albeit one more than the other, and it was recorded.  Both players played pretty poorly, and people didn't really feel satisfied with the conclusion.  To my knowledge, neither player stayed relevant after this.  As a matter of fact, I don't believe we have a single person who got top 3 more than once at any World Championship.

2013 World Championships

While the decks were all pretty much what you would expect for a set 11~ time frame (DDD/DOtE won, Descendant was 3rd and 4th, Beast Deities had a surprise 2nd place finish, but Novas were the most supported clan and they had quite a bit going for them), that isn't what I wanted to touch on.

These finals weren't filmed.  We can't touch on misplays or cheating.  People were upset with Bushiroad for this, but they did nothing about it.  It's hard to assess what happened under these conditions.  But we can talk about the individual who became World Champion.  Almeida Stewart.  There have been allegations of Almeida cheating to win the Parisian qualifiers.  It was said that he was able to stack opponents' decks without them or the judge noticing.  As the article mentions, "According to our source, the statement 'If you cheat, cheat good' attributed to him by those that attended the tournament, has been a common saying from him throughout his career." has been a defining highlight of his reputation.  If memory serves, I believe he was also caught stealing cards from a child and ended up getting in some legal trouble.  I heard another report of him being in the news for stealing 4000 Euros of card gaming supplies in a gang-related incident.  The truth of these claims is up in the air, but something definitely doesn't sit right here.

2014 World Championships

This is the second consecutive year that Bushiroad did not film the World Championship.  The top three decks were all the same (Seekers).  It's really hard to make any positive or negative commentary.  However, 2nd place was KEVIN CHO!  (Not really salty he beat me and knocked me out of the championships at Chicago this year, but I wanted to fill up space.)  For all I know, this could have been the golden year of everyone being good at the game.  The world may never know...

2014 was also the year they decided to fire JD Mercado for being too vocal about cheating that occurred in the Asia-Oceania Finals.  Or, at least, that is my assumption of what happened.  In this video you can see a Genesis player cheating really hard by having his preferred grade 2 ride face down, standing it as his Vanguard, saying, "Oops!", then adding it to his hand for his draw for turn.

2015 World Championships

R I P P U L was the deck that won the tournament this time.  We got to see the grand finals get played.  The Ripple player failed just about every turtle check and hit a critical just about every drive check, in spite of running draws and heal triggers.  It was a very disappointing final match to watch, because he was rewarded for his opponent having a completely locked-out deck while playing a deck that was honestly trash, playing it like trash (never did top 7 search for Pavroth when riding Turtle, although that mattered less since he always had Odysseus, because he was a sack), then getting rewarded with triggers and with the ability to counteract the opponent playing the game in a pre-Sebreeze era.  If he didn't sack triggers in such an insane way and if his opponent was actually hitting offensive triggers, the game would have spiraled out of the Ripple player's favor, easily.  He had multiple grade 3's in hand game 2 and only had enough shield in hand because he hit a critical trigger every single drive check game 2.  I decided to count triggers and turtles, so you can see how much of a sacklord this guy was with triggers, and why playing Turtle in a deck with 8 grade 3's is a waste.

Ripple player:

1st Drive Check - No trigger (False sense of security)
2nd Drive Check - Heal Trigger (Heal goes off)
3rd Drive Check - Critical Trigger
4th Drive Check - Critical Trigger
5th Drive Check - Critical Trigger
6th Drive Check - Critical Trigger
7th Drive Check - Critical Trigger

1st Turtle - Whiff (Heal)
2nd Turtle - Whiff (Genovious)
3rd Turtle - Perfect Guard (Pretty much the worst case scenario for calling a top card)
4th Turtle - Whiff (A lot of glare, but looks like a crit to me)
5th Turtle - Penguin Soldier

2016 World Championships

Our top 3 were:

1st - Daniel Middlesworth - 7C's Rush
2nd - Andy Lo - 7C's Rush
3rd -  Liu Bo Chen - Thing Saver/Sanc Guard

As most of you are probably aware, there was a lot of misplaying going around.  I believe it was 1st place who would use Nightrunners that were milled off of Nightrunners (the timing would be missed).  The Gears player Time Leaped Gigi into Melem (Time Leap doesn't go to the same grade, and these are both grade 1's).  The 3rd place player didn't discard for Sebreeze's skill (why he was running Sebreeze in a Sanc Guard deck is beyond me).  Issues like this popped up all over the place.  You've watched it or heard about it, and now you are angry.  And here we are.  We have yet to, other than the mysterious WC2014 which I wasn't able to find any real information on, have anything remotely close to a solid final match or a champion that we can say earned the title by being good at the game.  And people are upset by it.

So the question lies:  Have we ever had a respectable champion for an official Bushiroad tournament?  Was there ever a player who legitimately outplayed the metagame and took advantage of how the game was played without locking people out of their own mechanics or luck sacking critical triggers left and right?  The answer is yes.

Challenge Cup 2013.  Before Team Leagues were a thing, this was how Bushiroad decided to do what eventually became "Spring Fest".  They had shop qualifiers at many, many card shops all over the country.  Winners of these qualifiers made it to a state qualifier.  Winners of that state's qualifier made it to nationals.  Sadly, nationals was where the event stopped.  The individual who won nationals for this event was a very skillful player named Kaden Kawakami.  Here is how he did it.

He ran the typical DOtE list.  A lot of back row retirement.  A lot of draw triggers.  Typical walling for a deck in a metagame that struggled greatly to hit 18k.  So, how was his list different?  He didn't run any critical triggers.  You might be thinking, "So, he's bad then?"  Nope.  He outplayed everybody.  You see, in a best of 1 format, you have no idea what your opponent's trigger line-up is going to be.  When you stare down a restanding Vanguard like DOtE, you can only assume that he is going to have the threat of increased critical pressure and a potential restand.  Thus, the standard play against DOtE was to always guard him if you are capable of doing so.  Kaden knew this and decided to run stand triggers to reinforce his rear guard pressure and end games.  Keep in mind that during this timeframe, the standard meta way to play was to no guard any attack that didn't kill you to access limit break as early as possible, increasing the value of stand triggers even more.  He legitimately outplayed the format, the players, and the metagame.  And he didn't even have to lock people out of stride to do it.

It is my hope that we have another champion like Kaden to restore our faith in the game.  In order for this to happen, Bushiroad needs to keep a better eye on R&D, keeping the game safe from an over saturation in the metagame along with the cheese mechanics of rushing.  The only reason Gears or Wiseman Loop haven't won the last two championships was because rushing was the counter deck of the format, but the counters to rushing can't be used against the standard meta decks.  Is it healthy?  If rushing kills the cancer, does that make it chemotherapy?  I doubt it.  Bushiroad has designed themselves into a corner, and they have not handled it well.