Delinquent and Lusamine: Last-Minute Additions to Tomorrow's Expanded Banlist!

[SharKing319]

Maxie's Hidden Ball Trick and Unown DAMAGE were already slated to be banned from the Expanded format tomorrow, but just tonight, TPCi announced two more additions to the list: Delinquent and Lusamine!

 

 

I was honestly wondering why on earth Delinquent was being allowed to continue plaguing Expanded while Maxie and Unown got the axe. This card in combination with Red Card was already incredibly stupid from the outset, but in recent days, Peeking Red Card was added on to shuffle away the last card in your hand and most likely give you unusable junk in return. That nightmare combo, called "Exodia" by the community, could happen to you if your opponent went first, shutting you out of the game before you would even get to play. Just like the various forms of T1 Item lock, I'm very glad to see this gone.

 

Lusamine was another powerful tool in the already overly-crowded toolbox of disruption cards in the Expanded format, able to infinitely reclaim any of the large number of annoying Supporters and Stadiums, such as Team Flare Grunt, Plumeria, Faba, Silent Lab, Parallel City, Shrine of Punishment, and many, many more. This was especially problematic in combination with Magnezone from Plasma Storm, whose Ability, Dual Brains. allowed people to play the other Supporter and reclaim it with Lusamine in the same turn, without the inherent limits of VS Seeker.

 

 

While it is stunning that cards can apparently just be banned completely out of the blue like this, I fully agree with the cards they decided to ban. What do you guys think?

[Sakura150612]

Completely agreed. While I was not expecting the Delinquent ban (much less the Lusamine ban), I think it's completely justified. It wasn't something that showed up in every other game for me, but even if it's not something that ruined my gaming experience, it's still feels good to know that they're gone for good now. So yeah, good riddance xd

[Sadra]

The ban of Maxies and unown is complete absurd. Unown gets destroyed by any ability lock or bench limitation (sudowoodo, parallel). Maxies was supposedly banned due to omastar and kabutops but guess what, at least in expanded, these two cards are really not that great, even if maxies was around. I guess it was similiar to forest of giant plants to prevent future broken combos to appear, but I really wouldn't easily ban a card before seeing any solid tournament results. 

[SharKing319]

^ Well, it wasn't hard to see Maxie's Omastar locking the opponent's Items on turn 1, before they could even do anything. Wally and Forest of Giant Plants were banned because they enabled instant Item locks (with Trevenant and Vileplume, respectively), so there was already a solid precedent for this ban, which follows the exact same logic.

 

Though I wish they'd just banned Trevenant and Omastar instead of the cards that enabled them.

[Felidae_]

Tournament results will continue to be analyzed to maintain a healthy play environment. In particular, the Expanded format will be aggressively monitored because there are so many cards and potential combinations available to use

 

 

Delinquent

 

I have a question for the players who frequently play Expanded tournaments IRL: How many Delinquent combo decks did you actually face in larger scale tournaments?

I'm honestly a bit confused about this choice, because based on the lists provided by limitlesstcg for Dallas and Anaheim I didn't found a single Glaceon build (which I usually associate with the combo) in the top 50 / top 100. In addition, the only archetype where their database currently finds Delinquent being played in is Garbodor, with 0.33 cards / deck and even in those (i.e. Drampa + Garbodor or Zoroak + Garbodor) you only see Delinquent as a tool card, rather than the full combo.

 

Now, obviously their database is limited and looking only at the top 50 / 100 decks of any given tournament can hardly be seen as hard evidence, yet it is peculiar never the less to see that the combo has 0 impact on the top level.

I'd also add that I personally haven't seen the combo in ages online (or at least so rarely that I can count those games on one hand). While I'm not saying that is particular fun to play against those decks, it still baffles me that they'd go ahead and ban this card (maybe I simply lack the data to support their decision).

 

That being said, since the card had little to zero impact in the format I don't really care if its banned or not. Although I'm still annoyed by their approach to the competitive game. In my opinion disruptive strategies need to be available as well (available, not dominant), otherwise you end up with an unbalanced format. Aggro, Midrange, Combo and Control, all archetypes need their share of tools to create an interesting environment.

This whole idea of “everyone should have fun” contradicts the idea of a competitive game in my opinion and granted I might simply be the wrong audience for their approach, it still doesn't sit right with me.

 

Lusamie

 

I can definitely understand this ban. Especially after banning Puzzle of Time it felt rather odd that they'd introduce a supporter that can create an infinite value chain with itself.

Lusamie is a perfect example of a card that found its way into almost every archetype and quite honestly was simply too strong.

I'm rather sad about the lose for Wailord stall, since Lusamie was the tool that allowed my budget deck (eventually I'll have those Beaches ) to do so well, but in the end it's probably better for the format as a whole.

 

Maybe a reprint that exiles itself from the discard pile (in order to prevent and shenanigans with itself and VS Seeker) could work out, but even then Lusamie might still be too strong.

 

It's a bit sad though that we never saw Lusamie and Lt. Surge's Strategy in Expanded. Oh well, the dream still lives on in Standard .

 

An outlook towards the future

 

Based on their recent bans it seems to be only a matter of time when Archie will get axed off.

At the moment the only saving grace is that there isn't any disruptive stage 2 water Pokemon (as it seems that they only care about this, rather than the ability to “cheat” a stage 2 in play on turn 1 as a whole).

The future for Expanded doesn't look to good in my opinion. TPCI is now at a point in time where they slowly realize that governing two separate formats is quite tricky, especially if one of them is non-rotating. Unless they eventually decided to slowly drop sets from Expanded (i.e. have it be XY Base onwards, then XY RS onwards, then XY BRK onwards and so forth, the catalogue of disruptive combos will just pile up.

Additionally, those last minute additions to the ban list won't sit well with a lot of players. Emergency bans are fine, but I can't think of any good reason why they'd change their mind over the course of the last three weeks regarding those two. What TPCI essentially displayed here is that you shouldn't make any investment into a new deck before the final ban list is revealed, as last minute additions can happen regardless of previous announcements.

In MtG we see a lot of financial speculations before the new B&R announcement and I can only imagine that the same is happening in Pokemon. At least you still get to use those Lusamie FA's .