One Hit KO

Well, I’ve discussed much of this already, but I thought I should give a bit of a wrap-up to finalize this season’s OneHitKO.com Challenge.  Yeah, I said “this season’s” implying that there may be others on the horizon.  That’s a bit of an open-ended question at the moment, but we can discuss that later.  Let’s first get to the positives and negatives of this challenge.

Negatives

When I first dreamed up this crazy plan, I had several goals.  My overarching number one goal was to build community around this project.  Have we succeeded in that?  Well, I think it’s been mostly a unmet goal.  Looking at webserver statistics, it seems that the site is getting slightly more views now. I can’t be sure if that has anything to do with the challenge, just the fact that there have been more articles lately, or just the fact that City Championships were in full swing. Since I can’t undoubtedly attribute it to the challenge, I won’t.

What I originally hoped for (and expected) was that many people would come together and each donate maybe 4-8 cards.  I would have a bunch of random “junk” to sift through and build from.  Making a deck out of this card pool would be my challenge while donating would be yours.  Unfortunately, that didn’t happen really at all.  I had only 3 real donators, and, of them, I already had a friendship with 2.  That means that only 1 person decided to go out on a limb and risk sending me cards in order to be part of something greater.

My losses outweighed my wins.  I had a goal to go better than 50/50 win/loss in any given tournament.  I missed one tournament and had to drop one round early from another (both events I see as negatives in their own right).  I did go exactly 50/50 in 2 of 3 tourneys, but I never achieved greater than that.  This makes me feel as if I misused the generous donations and failed on my end of the bargain (even though it was always a goal and never a promise).
Continue reading "OneHitKO.com Challenge: Wrap-Up with Budget Engine"

A big hello to all you OHKOers out there, this is Pikkdogs  here.  We are now proud to bring you my quarterly review of the new set that is coming into the format.  Before each set I usually write an article that highlights 10 cards that I think will make the most impact on this format and the future ones.  Noble Victories is no different, here is the article.

Noble Victories was quite a mysterious set.  We thought it might be a lot of the cards from the Red Collection that was released in Japan, but we weren’t sure.  Now we can be be sure, it is mostly made up of Red Collection cards and some cards from Theme decks.  The mystery of this set has obscured a lot of the hype that usually surronds these sets.  The only card that was getting some hype was Victini.  Now we know exactly what is in the set, we can give it a fuller review.

Before I talk about the set, let’s get one thing straight, these cards will not be legal for fall Regionals.  So even though a lot of people have the Victini card now, you still can’t play it …

A big hello to all you OHKOers out there.  This is Pikkdogs here with my sidekick Pedro, and we have an article about strategy for Noble Victories pre-release tournaments.  Now people don’t normally go to Pre-Releases for the thrill of victory.  Pre-Releases are for fun and for getting the new cards.  But, while your there, you might as win right?  Some tournament organizers also give a free pack to the winner of the pre-release, so it s a good thing to win.

Pedro, are you going to a pre-release this weekend?

Well, no.  I’m going to watch the UFC event.

Oh, you like the MMA hey?  MMA is kinda cool, it’s like boxing but with colorful shirts.

Gotta love the colorful shirts. 

John McCain doesn’t like MMA though, he said it’s like human cockfighting.

No, I’ve seen human cockfighting, and they don’t wear the colorful shirts.  They don’t wear much of anything.

Well, there goes our hope of having a clean article, let’s get off the subject of cockfighting and let’s get onto the article.

How to Build a Pre-Release Deck

Pre-Release tournaments are held with a 40 card deck that you make out of 6 packs(unless your area holds …