Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, by Xiao Yang

White hole, white tomorrow is waiting for us.

At the end of March, an ordinary weekend in Guangzhou, the weather was bad, it began to rain on Thursday, and a white fog hung over the Baiyun hillside. Half of the passers-by are holding umbrellas, and the young people in the convenience store are eating car noodles, everything is calm and gentle, just like the temperature of 25 degrees here.

The participants in the Guangzhou Masters of Pokemon may be one of the few busy people this weekend, with the event building the venue a few days ahead of schedule, and most of the contestants and referees arrived on Friday. If you simply calculate the cost, contestants from Beijing or Shanghai have a round trip fare of 2000 yuan, three nights of accommodation, and need to take at least one extra day off; contestants from local or surrounding cities are better, and they account for a larger proportion. But whether online or live, it's hard to hear anyone complaining about this, whether your goal is to win the championship, to make it to the next day or to take part in an off-court game, everyone is enjoying this hard-won Pokemon weekend.

The morning before the contestants came from all over the country, I sat on the side of the field near the door, hoping that the wind blowing from outside would make me feel cool-it was a failed attempt, but my body and my heart were still hot.

What on earth am I participating in? I've been looking forward to this day ever since I started playing physical cards, or even earlier. I like a lot of games, and some of them are at a good level. StarCraft 2 has been playing all the time, and Sprudun 2 has been playing well. But it's hard for me to get that precious, near-climax pleasure from it-it's the crown pearl of war games, it means victory, happiness, and you're the best. In the mainstream e-sports project, with my current competitive state, talent and effort, I have nothing to do with this "competition" at all.

But "Bao Ke Meng" card, a little embarrassed to say, because previously (at least in the country) not many people play, my level is quite good. The game quickly became the focus of entertainment for my friends and me after 2019, when we abandoned board games, electronic cards in Quint and Legend of hearthstone, and the weekly gang-up time of "DOTA 2" to play a game made up of 60 pieces of paper, even if it didn't even have Chinese.

At first, our team was very small, and so was the player community of the game. I found a "monthly competition" organization in Beijing. Once a month, the competition, with a registration fee of 25 yuan and 10 to 20 people at a time, was committed to the underground canteen of an international school, which later became a cafe, dining bar and card shop. I met the first friends who played the game in this organization, and to this day, some of them still play cards with me.

Our little month competition has been suspended now. While participating in the official competition, I occasionally think of the days when I used to play cards in the school canteen, followed by late 2019. Due to the sale of the traditional Chinese version, the game gradually became a little hot on our side. Card shops began to hold large and small competitions, but the number of people was small. The competition in Beijing is usually between 16 and 32 people, and occasionally some are close to 50 people. It's a big game. Shanghai and Guangzhou have a stronger atmosphere and a slightly larger number of people, but only 30 to 50 people a game.

After a while, I felt tired about "playing the game". These competitions are usually held by stores, charging some registration fees in exchange for goods as prizes, fighting back and forth or the same group of people. You can understand it as a community sports meeting. Although the neighbors are very kind and can bring home two bags of noodles and a bucket of soybean oil if they win, I prefer to participate in the Olympic Games.

At that time, the scale of the store competition was relatively small, especially when you could see the competition going on abroad-in 2022, the offline competition of "Bao Ke Meng" was gradually resuming. On August 18 last year, London held its first Pok é mon World Championships since the outbreak, but on the same day, we could only participate in community-scale store-level competitions.

This is why I look forward to the simplified Chinese version of the "Bao Ke Meng" card-apart from the increased number of players and convenient language, the "official competition" is the most important, with which we can go to a bigger stage and compete with long-established professionals. The weekend we spent in Guangzhou a few days ago was the first step in the plan.

It's hard for my friends to understand how I feel. I've been waiting for this for too long. The distance, time, nothing can stop me from flying to the Masters, and even better, there are 2000 people like me sharing the same field.

Cracking the environment to prepare for the competition is a bit like an exam, honing yourself at the same time, you also need to know what other cards are in the environment and how they work.

Specifically, in preparation for this Guangzhou Masters, as the first official major event of the simplified Chinese version, the Guangzhou Masters was held on March 25, while the latest "Bao Ke Meng" card supplement package "Xianqi Zeng" went on sale on March 17.

This is also a bit special-the "environment" of the card game, that is, all the cards in the card pool, varies according to the sale of the new product. As the game continues to release new supplement packs, the card pool gradually expands. Sometimes, although there are only a few useful cards in the new product, it will have a considerable impact on the player's construction strategy. In the week or two after the new card is released, we usually constantly adjust our construction choices and try new card groups. Participate in large and small store-level competitions, and finally find out the whole environment.

Before the qualifier, my friends and I were in a meeting to revise the card deck, so the Guangzhou Masters held a week after the launch of the new product was the first game in a new environment. Every top player has his or her own direction, and some people especially like this unstable environment, while others are more used to playing in an environment that has evolved for some time. As for individuals, I am not a good environmental forecaster. Improving strategies and playing style in a lot of practice is my specialty.

But as you know, these so-called good and bad things are no excuse, and in the month before the start of the game, I was trying to crack the environment-in other words, I want to predict what sets of cards most contestants play and what sets of cards will respond to this "mainstream trend", and to find a set of cards that have an advantage over both "mainstream sets" and "mainstream sets". At the same time, it needs to maintain its own stability so that I can survive the 12-round Swiss round for two days.

In previous small-scale tests with friends, I found that although the new card could not be used much, it had a great impact on the environment as a whole, especially "Unmanned Power Plant", "Super long-eared Rabbit & Fat Ding GX" and "rotten Wood Devil & Night Devil GX", which almost reshaped the whole environment, allowing everyone to break away from the last version of the stable card deck and into a quagmire of uncertainty. If compared to racing cars, the previous version was Formula one, and this version became Le Mans 24-hour endurance race.

Luck is also part of the game, in this picture I caught a discarded hand, the next round will be kicked to death in about a month, I tried to find a way to win Le Mans, but in the end I got nothing. I found some strong card sets, such as "AlZeus & Diya Luca & Palucia GX" with "Flower Rock Monster", but it is difficult to solve the problem of mirror backhand disadvantage; "sparkling Dream Kit" card set is also good, but it is difficult for it to fight back in the face of "Pikachu & Tecrom GX"; "slamming head clown" has a high upper limit, but instability is an inherent disadvantage.

In the end, I chose the card deck with "Pikachu & Jekrom GX" as the core. It is not the top level in this environment, but it is my most skilled partner who has achieved results in the past. I hope this advantage in fit will reduce my chances of making mistakes in 12 rounds of high-intensity games.

But on the whole, the preparation for the war was not a success. The final competition environment was somewhat different from what I had predicted. The card set of "Alzeus & Diya Luca & Palucia GX" with "Flower Rock Monster" did not perform well, and the match-to-card I put into it in the construction also became a burden.

The goal is Bao Ke Meng at the beginning, and my goal for this competition is to play the Swiss round. Card games usually use the "Swiss System" rule, which first determines the number of rounds according to the number of people. The algorithm is usually "the power of the number of rounds = 2". For example, for a game of 32 people, it is better to have five rounds. The Masters is expected to have about 2000 people, so it is 11 or 12 rounds. Considering that the time is set to two days, eight rounds will be held on the first day and four rounds on the second day, and the top 16 will enter the knockout stage.

With a scale of 2000 people, it takes some luck to get into the knockout stage, that is to say, if I want to break through the Swiss round and enter the knockout round, I need to play more than 11-1, and 10-2 will only have a small chance of promotion. As we adopt the winning or losing method of one round, it is not easy to maintain a high winning rate in a card game in which luck accounts for a certain proportion.

My opponent in the first round is from Guangzhou and controls a set of "sparkling Dream Kit" card set. Generally speaking, you will meet some less powerful opponents in the first few rounds of the Swiss round, usually from local or nearby cities, who are not very skilled and try it with a focus on participation-- but this opponent of mine is obviously not. he was just unlucky and had a bad start, and I quickly gained an advantage at the start and snowballed all the way to victory.

After the first round, due to the delay in the morning live activities, the organizers announced a meal break. This kind of all-day competition usually allows players to rest for an hour or two around 12:00 noon. Most experienced contestants will not really run out for dinner. On the one hand, they are full and sleepy. On the one hand, time is also a problem. 2000 people pour into a McDonald's at the same time. Perhaps the end of the meal break can not get their own hamburgers.

Card holders, mascots, water, pens, and unphotographed chocolates are all essential items for my competition. My opponent in the second round had this problem. He was a few minutes late for eating out. According to the rules, the opponent who is five minutes late will be judged to be defeated in this round, but fortunately, this friend rushed back in a hurry, but you know, it is very difficult for a person to maintain a calm state of mind in this state, maybe it is because he is late that he cannot shuffle the cards fully. He remained motionless in the first few rounds and was won by me.

In the third round, I met a familiar player from Shanghai who had won the Shanghai championship in the previous challenge (equivalent to the preliminary round). The specific matching rule of the Swiss round is the pairing of players with the same results. for example, if I got 2-0 in the first two rounds, my opponent in the third round must also be 2-0. If I lose, I will match another 2-1 player in the next round.

But the same record is not exactly the same. The Swiss system will compare "small points" to determine the ranking at the same time, while "small points" will be determined according to the opponent's winning rate and the opponent's winning rate. Losing early means you will encounter an opponent with a lower winning rate. To put it simply, if the final results are 10-2, people who lose two sets in a row from 10-0 will rank higher than those who win 10 sets in a row from 0-2.

The championship trophy, I hope I can touch it next time, so we don't want to see it when we meet so early, which disrupts my battle plan to some extent. I wanted to end with at least 7-1 on the first day, so I couldn't accept losing in the third round. Anyway, this mentality affected my judgment of the game and mistakenly dragged the whole game into the seesaw battle, in which the opponent's "Fire Dragon-Leishram GX" card group was better, and Murphy's law worked on me, 2-1.

As I recalled the previous match, while sitting with my opponent in the fourth round, waiting for the match to start, I noticed that the opponent's shuffling technique was very rough. He inadvertently let me see two cards in the library, namely "Fire-breathing Dragon & Leishram GX" and "Blue Exploration". I quickly judged that this set of cards was "Little Blue Fire-breathing Dragon" and took corresponding countermeasures-choosing a back attack.

"Little Blue Fire Dragon" is a card deck that relies heavily on attacking the first round. According to blind selection, my card deck should choose to attack first, and my winning rate of this set of cards is very low, which can be regarded as a big disadvantage against the game. But I finally won the game because of the information accidentally revealed by the other side, which is a small hint. It's especially useful for friends who don't compete very often: never provide your opponent with additional information.

In practice, you have to play different cards in order to know where the weakness of each deck is. Then, I lost to two card sets with "Super Dream & Dream GX" as the core. Before the game, I decided that the number of this set of cards should have dropped sharply in the environment, but in fact, it was not. This was my biggest misjudgment.

The score was 3-3, and I was virtually out of the knockout stage, which hit me a lot, especially considering that there was a long schedule ahead and I had to continue to play hopelessly. I won the next two rounds as I wanted, ending the first day with a 5-3 win. The two friends who were traveling with me didn't do well either. We gave up the previous theory of "don't eat randomly before the game" (and half gave up the game) and went to eat a roast pigeon in Guangzhou.

There were four rounds of Swiss ships on the second day, and as half of the people were eliminated on the first day, the venue was finally less crowded. After settling down, I played quite well, with 3 wins and one overtime double defeat. I recorded 9-3 in my own notebook, but the actual official record was 8-4, 206. For a competitive player, this result is quite poor, and I am always reluctant to face it. But if you lower the requirements a little bit... At least won the 5-win participation award (a souvenir card), but it's all right.

It can also be regarded as the memorial white hole that I have attended, and the white tomorrow is waiting for us to say that it is acceptable because I have prepared for the worst.

The day before the race, it began to rain in Guangzhou and flights began to be cancelled on a large scale. Two of my friends woke up to find that the flight was gone and urgently rebooked the high-speed train. Some people changed their plane to Shenzhen and then went there by train. Players from small cities did not even have a ticket to change, so they had no choice but to withdraw. The official emergency opened the exit channel the day before the game.

I sat in front of the large glass window of T3 at the Capital Airport. The sky in Beijing was gray as usual. My only wish at that time was to let the plane take off and land smoothly. I couldn't miss this opportunity.

Fortunately-- for the time being, it can be described as "fortunately"-- my plane hovered in the sky for nearly two hours before landing in Guangzhou, at least in time.

Unable to go to the toilet while hovering, many non-local players failed to come to Guangzhou because of the delay on the way, and 500 people finally signed up at the scene of the game. Many people even lined up on a rainy night. One of my opponents, from Haikou, said he drove over and started queuing at the entrance of the venue at 2 p.m., just to get places for registration.

From the point of view of the exhibition alone, you can see many areas where the organization team is not proficient, such as the contestants can not find their own table number, the Mini Program for matching crashed. But considering that this is our first Masters, all these issues are not so important. When I sat on the field, I saw the players who were preparing for the competition out of sight, the trainers who came to sign up by themselves, and the children of the children's group who came to participate in the competition with their parents, which meant a lot to the "Baokemeng" community in the country. it's not just cards.

The Children's Group Competition when my game was over, I took the time to take a look around the second floor of the field, where there were qualifying matches, entertainment areas and novice teaching, just like a small exhibition, where you can really see passers-by walking into the venue and kids fighting. This is the meaning of the other half of the Masters: in addition to providing a stage for real competition players, it also opens a door to Pokemon.

As my generation grows up, children of the new era don't actually come into contact with Pokemon very often. In the past, the works of "Bao Ke Meng" that children had official access to were almost only intermittent theatrical versions of movies, KFC linked toys, or "Bao Ke Meng: sun and Moon" animations that were copyrighted and not copyrighted. After the establishment of Baokemeng (Shanghai) Toy Co., Ltd., I think we can finally expect more.

On the first day, most people were still playing downstairs, and there were not many people in the activity area on the second floor. It was hard for you to imagine this two or three years ago, but it really happened. We can buy authentic Pokemon cards in convenience stores, participate in official events large and small, have our own competition area, have so many people working on the same thing, and there will be more competitions in the future, and we can even go to the WCS. All this makes me want to cry and makes me feel that it is worth waiting for such a long time. The children who began to watch "Bao Ke Meng" at the end of the last century finally waited for their belated dream 20 years later.

Now, a new group of children are attracted by these cards printed with Xiao Bao's dream, and they will also watch us move forward.

The children stepped onto the stage

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