What are the changes?

Day 1 will instead be using the Alternating Decks format. Similar to 2 Deck, it features two decks. Instead of 2 Deck, instead of utilizing both decks every round, instead of bringing all your tools to bear every round, you instead alternate between the two, playing a Bo3 each round on a single deck (also the time limit is dropped from 90 minutes to 70 which will be relevant later). Odd numbered rounds will feature your Deck A, while even numbered rounds will feature your Deck B, giving us the following play pattern:

1 A

2 B

3 A

4 B

5 A

6 B

7 A

Thus, whatever strategy you had planned for how your two decks would work in tandem is gone. This essentially means instead of having one extremely skill intensive tournament, we instead have two completely separate normal tournaments on the same day.

So, you may notice, what’s to stop people from just playing their best deck each round? How could anyone possibly track whether Chris P Bacon is actually playing Deck A or Deck B? Well Square Enix has thought of that, and the answer is:

Your two decks and two LB decks must all have different sleeves.

If that sounds like it has nothing to do with the question at hand, that’s because it has nothing to do with the question at hand. I’m not watching Ben Dover like a hawk so that if I happen to get paired with him next round and he plays those godawful chartreuse war crime sleeves against me I’ll know he played the same deck as last round. I should not have to go scout every potential opponent and enter their sleeve colors into a goddamn Excel spreadsheet to protect myself from cheating. “Hmm yes Viridian has brought Mauve and Vermillion, meanwhile Mauve has brought Celadon and Juniper” hell yeah let’s stop by the quilting convention after we’re done. Get some paint swatches so we can redecorate our guest bedrooms. And how different do they have to be? I have custom Dragon Shields with best girl Arima Kana on them. Red anime girl on white. Can I now not run custom Dragon Shields with Asuka Langley Soryu? Are two white sleeves with red anime girls too similar? I have no fucking idea. Do they need to be instantly differentiable at a glance by a floor judge? I don’t know. What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhino? Elefino.

Why are the changes being made?

Here we can only speculate. It is at this point that I hope to be the most neutral. There is a good answer for this which I’d like to address first: some other events are run like this and SQEX wants to unify rulesets. I can get behind that. I fundamentally disagree with it, I think it’s the wrong choice, I think 2 Deck is a much better format than Alternating Decks, but I can at least respect it. I can understand how SQEX might look across the sea, see a bunch of people running their events differently, and seek to bring them all together. While I can appreciate the sentiment here, let me assure you having heard from dozens of professional players in the last 24 hours (caveat: almost all were NA players) the 2 Deck format is uniquely beloved. It is skill intensive in a way that Alternating Decks simply is not. I plan to speak more about the difference later, but for now let me just stick the point that potentially it is worth it to SQEX to switch to a more hated format in favor of unity.

There is also an extremely bad answer to this which I would like to address. Being fair, I do not think this is the reason, but I would be remiss if I did not touch on it. There may be financial constraints. The National Championship is taking place in rented hotel space. It features staff paid directly by Square Enix. It is the only event in North America that is beholden to these two things. Materia Cups are held at local venues, at card shops, and it is up to those shops to source tournament organizers, judges, and to figure out their streaming situation. Square Enix is relatively uninvolved with the details, leaving the individual store to concern themselves with said details. Here, SQEX is in charge. And unlike Materia Cups occurring at dedicated tournament areas, the National Championship is at a hotel. In Los Angeles. Right next to LAX. And that hotel is charging them. What are the rates? I have no idea. But there is a non-zero chance that cutting the length of the tournament by two hours (over the course of seven rounds, going from 90 minutes per round to 70 saves 140 minutes) saves a considerable amount of money. Money that also does not need to be paid to the judges, the commentators, or the behind-the-scenes staff. Now I’m as violently leftist as they come, and paying predatory corporations less sounds great to me (although paying workers less is an affront to God) but that’s not the real reason this is a bad reason. This is a bad reason because I would be more than happy to play 2 Deck in 70 minutes if that’s what it took. I would understand. Is money a problem? We’re happy to compromise. Let’s just shorten the round timer and play 2 Deck, we swear we’ll play faster.

What makes these changes so bad?

The best way for me to explain this is to do something I probably shouldn’t do. I’m gonna explain my strategy for Nationals. I’m gonna come clean about one of the two decks I’m playing. And I’m absolutely going to pay for this next weekend, but I need you to understand how much this change has fucked me. I need you to understand how singularly angry I am about this. How much it has thrown all of my preparation into the dumpster and lit that dumpster on fire.

So for those of you who aren’t weirdly parasocial, I recently made Top 4 at a Materia Cup with Turbo Chaos. I love that deck. But, as a known quantity, I think it’s a bad deck to choose for a single deck tournament. That detail is important, a SINGLE DECK tournament. It’s too easy for the room to decide that 1/3rd of them will run MD or Lev 6 and suddenly I can’t make Day 2. I mean look at the deck that beat me in semis. I literally cannot beat this deck on Turbo Chaos. If Milo and I played 100 games, I would be extremely lucky to win once, even if he didn’t know the matchup (which to his credit he very much did (oh god did he ever)). However, in 2 Deck, suddenly that’s ok. His deck runs both the cards I want to see least, which means if someone runs it in 2 Deck, their other deck cannot have either. Which means their other deck is fair game for Turbo Chaos (probably). So, if I run a second deck that has (roughly) the same matchup spread as Turbo Chaos, if I run a deck that loses to the same decks but wins vs the same decks, I can ignore my own weakness by preying on the weaknesses of others! (probably)

So I’ve been testing and planning and searching and scheming and I came up with a second extremely aggressive deck to pair with TC. And I’ve been grinding that deck at locals and in playtesting. It’s a deck I never would have chosen to play normally. It’s a deck I absolutely would not choose to play in a Bo3 setting like what we have now. But it’s what I’ve spent a fucking month testing and practicing, believing it to be good for a format that no longer exists. That month is gone. All my preparation, a month of testing from August eleventh to now, gone. All my strategizing, all my theorycrafting, all my experimentation, gone. Worthless. Invalidated. And I qualified late. There are people who qualified weeks, or even months before me. Hell, there are people who qualified last December. They all deserve to be even more upset than me.

So what’s the best play now?

With all that in mind, the optimal strategy is to play the two individually strongest decks you can muster without fighting over cards. There’s no nats unique metagame where you try to deduce what two decks other people will play and try to counter that, it’s just the normal single deck metagame except twice. 2 Deck provides unique and interesting decisions that you do not ever have to think about in any other format, and Alternating Decks absolutely does not give a fuck about those decisions. It prioritizes playing as safe as possible, where 2 Deck can sometimes find itself with the result that double risky decks is the strategy. That’s the situation I found myself in, where I trusted that two risky decks could come together to present a formidable and fearsome duo. That together, they could stand tall against the metagame. That by accepting their weaknesses, they could overcome and find success.

But no.

I’ll never find out if I was right.

That’s been taken away.

And now we revert to the reign of the safest, most boring decks on the planet.

There’s no excitement.

There’s no drama.

There’s only control.

Both in terms of archetypes, and in terms of SQEX’s meddling.

How does this affect people who haven’t qualified yet?

This, to me, is the part that truly pisses me off the most. Moreso than anything that affects me. All of these changes have only been announced via personal direct e-mail to people already qualified for nationals. The only reason anyone not qualified knows about these changes is because we all have been doing our best to signal boost them. And while it is certainly personal that I want a lot of people to know about these decisions that I disagree with, there are some people out there who need to know. Ten invites have yet to go out. Ten people will be affected by these changes who have not yet been told about them. The Last Chance Qualifier, happening one day before Nats, originally promised four invites, but six people have had to decline, leaving a total of ten invites on the table for the LCQ. The LCQ is literally the day before nats. It is in Los Angeles. Everyone competing in it needs to know about these changes before they leave their homes. And they have not been made public outside of the efforts of the community. Even the official post regarding the North American Championship on Square Enix’s own website which was updated the same day as this announcement doesn’t adequately explain the new format.

Here’s the update in its entirety as seen on their website:

Is the difference in formats really worth getting this worked up over?

Let me assure you, while I have a strong, strong preference for 2 Deck, I would have been more than happy not to play it. If SQEX had announced Alternating Decks was going to be the Nats format back in January, or even March, I wouldn’t be upset today. If the format had been changed with even a month remaining before Nats, I might have been irritated, but I wouldn’t be unspeakably livid in the way that I am now. With only a week between the announcement and the event, there simply is not time for anyone to adequately prepare for Nationals. Alternating Decks is not just a small change from 2 Deck, it is a completely different format. Let me illustrate.

In 2 Deck, as I talked about earlier, so long as both your decks can beat one of your opponent’s decks, you should win the matchup. Let’s take a look at a theoretical inverse of 2 Deck, where instead of needing to win with both decks, you have to avoid losing with both decks. Where once you lose with a deck, you must switch to your other deck. Here, it makes more sense to play safer decks with a wider range of good matchups. Here, it makes more sense to play decks that cover each other’s bad matchups. Here, the basic strategy in what two decks you want to bring is completely flipped on its head. Whatever strategy is good normally is bad here.

And Alternating Decks is even more different than that. It is fundamentally and totally a different format. And we have a week, a mere seven days to deal with that. Again, if this change had been announced a long time ago, if we had enough time to contend with it, then maybe it would have been accepted. But by announcing it only one week out, Square Enix has destroyed the months upon months of practice that we have put in to solving the format, in to achieving comfort with a format that no longer exists. With only one week left, how can we possibly properly prepare for a new format, one that has never been tried in North America before? How are we supposed to adapt with so little foreknowledge to a format that is completely alien to us? And considering that no part of this change has been made public, how are the LCQ contestants supposed to stand on equal ground to those who have already qualified?

This is the most important takeaway here: by completely changing how the National Championship works on a fundamental level with only seven days on the clock,

Square Enix has violated the trust of its players.

So what can we do?

Honestly? Nothing. We’re fucked. Short of a total player strike come September 21st, there’s no way we can convince SQEX to return things to the way they should be. They hold all the cards, and we are but bit players in their story. I’m doing what I can by being as loud and obnoxious as possible, and by trying to minimize the potential damage to LCQ participants, but I genuinely don’t have any good answers. I don’t even have a good denouement. If you’re not playing at Nats, then pray for us.

And if you are can you please do me a huge favor and pretend I didn’t just announce to the entire fucking world that I’m playing Turbo Chaos cuz jesus fucking christ please just play a Forward on turn 1 and pass turn to me with exactly two in hand please please please please please