One Piece Card Game Players Frustrated With Ban List Rollout
Just a day after the One Piece Day festivities took place in Japan, another celebration took place as early this week the One Piece Card Game announced the highly anticipated ban list to curb an oppressive metagame dominated by two particular decks. Although the announcement was expected, the execution, both time frame-wise and card-wise, was not.
Monday, August 12th saw the official decree that both the infamous Red and Purple Trafalgar Law Leader card which has dominated the entire OP08 format as well as the Black Enies Lobby Stage card, which was an unexpected hit to the Black Rob Lucci strategy will be banned for the Japan player base starting on September 1st. This coincides with the release of the OP09 expansion of the game in Japan. But the announcement didn't say when the West, which is three months behind in card releases, would receive news of the bans.
Late Monday night, however, saw an announcement no one saw coming. The same bans would be coming to the West as expected, but they will be in effect for the start of the OP08 format starting Friday, September 6th, a full three months earlier than anticipated. This means that the West will play events during the eighth expansion in a completely different meta than Japan did. But the timing will also flip the North American Finals meta on its head.
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The North American Finals tournament, which is being held as a part of the Bandai Card Games Fest World Tour, brings together the best players from across the region to determine who will be representing NA at the World Championship. This tournament was announced that it would be played using the OP07 format meaning that cards released through the seventh expansion would be legal. The issue here is that the ban list, which is effectively in effect for OP08 onwards, is technically in effect for this event as it takes place on the weekend of September 13th.
While the two cards being banned are prominent in the OP07 metagame, they are not quite ban-worthy in this environment despite the two decks they are used in being the top two decks in the format. But with the timing of the tournament being hit in the crossfire of the announcement, Both the Red/Purple Law deck and Black Rob Lucci deck having their bans active means that other strategies that were deemed non-viable are now options to rise for this one tournament.
This isn't the first time a big tournament saw its metagame altered by being in the crossfire of a ban list announcement. The last ban list, which saw the banning of three cards; Blue/Black Sakazuki leader, the Black Great Eruption event, and Yellow Reject event, was announced to take effect at the start of OP07, but because historically ban lists are announced a week before an expansion set is legal, any tournament in that area between the pre-release weekend and the weekend after the release of the new expansion effectively will operate in a one-off tournament with a format unique to that tournaments in that very small window.
One of these tournaments was held in Mesquite, Texas. Which saw a ton of unexpected decks emerge because of this massive change to the metagame. “Mesquite format” also known as “EB01.5” saw nearly double the number of viable deck choices versus what the EB01 meta game showed the week prior. And while the format was shortlived as it only existed for one weekend, history has now repeated itself with the stakes at its highest with the North American Finals now also receiving a format that will be unique to itself.
Only time will tell how the metagame will adapt for the North American Finals format and beyond but the race to become the next One Piece Card Game pirate king surely got a lot more interesting.
WARREN YOUNGER