When the new ban list was revealed, a lot of people deemed it fake, despite it appearing on shriek. With its removal, the player base cheered. When its credibility became unquestionable, the crowd silenced.
First of, the Mars 1st ban list blows. It kills of decks confined to tier 2, while leaving all TCG and OCG tier 1 decks completely unharmed. The point of the ban list is to balance the format. This ban list kills off the rogues.
The good things that happened was the banning of Trishula and Dustshoot. Trishula was the lone game-breaking synchro, the only one giving advantage by merely being summoned. It's gone and I won't miss it. Dustshoot on the other hand was never as inherently broken as Trishula was, but it was the closest thing we had to a turn 1 one card FTK, and the card basically fills all the criteria for being banned; very strong, a tad imbalanced, only useable in some situations.
Unlimited CotH won't change a thing, Emergency Teleport on 2 is better than 1, but still close to mediocre. I won't go through all the happenings, since it had all already been thoroughly dissected by others.
The second topic I want to talk about is the state of the game. For this, I advise you read through the top 16 feature matches from YCS Atlanta. Notice something which happened in all the matches?
The disadvantaged player had to resort to setting Maxx "C" in order to survive. Inzektor and especially Wind-Up are broken decks, and the only answer is hand traps. If your opponent drops turn 1 Rai-Oh, for example, your previously useable cards suddenly turned into blanks.
And that is the fall and defining feature of this format: Hand traps. These cards are now not only a tech, but a necessity to survive this format, which is not only a symptom of a unhealthy format, but a pitfall. In order to fight the faster decks, you have to play hand traps, significantly weakening your anti-meta match-up. Therefore it isn't such a big surprise that T.G, an extremely stable deck, won.
What I'd like to say however, is a different story than the 'under the radar' T.G. deck winning.
This format is crazy. And next format will be worse. In fact, I think the March 2012 format might just be the worst format of all time. Worse than Chaos. Worse than Tele-DAD. Worse than Frog FTK.
Frog FTK could potentially win turn 1, but had issues with unplayable hands, weakness to D.D. Crow, not drawing Mass Driver, etc. Inzektors are a manageable threat (don't set anything, so they can't destroy it, remove their resources, use disruption, and more).
Wind-Ups can realiably discard around 3 cards from and opposing players hand turn 1, 4 cards if they instead choose to do so turn 2, 6+ cards if they have Foolish Burial/Pot of Avarice, and Wind-Up Hunter sends rather discards, taking away the otherwise auto-loss of Dark Worlds.
The worst thing is Konamis attitude about this. On the judge forum they ask players to "step up their game" instead of apologizing. Or committing suicide.
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