Hello everyone and welcome to the post-worlds edition of Brawl for All. A lot has happened since the last time I typed a word for this series, and it's about time I get started on covering it. First of all, UFS worlds has come and gone and we have a new world champion. Congratulations to Andrew Olexa, our new champ, playing ultra rare Vega. Reviewing the entrants and their decks revealed that something around 25 different characters were registered for worlds, which is really quite impressive. The top 16, however, proved to be a who's who in UFS, featuring the usual suspects, and some familiar faces to boot. Congratulations are in order to everyone who placed in this most exclusive of groups. For an entire year, you can say you are one of the top 16 UFS players in the world!

My article this week, however, isn't about worlds, surprisingly. It's about UFS. Our beloved game has grown and continues to do so. Worlds featured an astonishing 180+ turnout, catching most everyone by surprise. This was the reason for the cut to the top 16, instead of the usual 8. This event, and several others have occurred in the past several months, and should serve as a wake up call to us players, and STG alike. My "Wish List" is a compilation of 8 things I would like to see changed or done differently in UFS, in order to preserve it as it grows and becomes more popular. Keep in mind, this list is meant to be entirely constructive, and in the end, they are merely the opinion of one person, although some points do strike a chord in the community at large. I do feel I have a rather close connection to the game and the gamers and some of these points intersect in the eyes of many UFS players. Finally, the list is in no particular order.

#1 - UFS needs a rock-solid set of tournament rules to end confusion at basic levels

As an example, little situations keep coming up in local tournaments, and most of the time to settle the argument, we have to spend 10 minutes searching the rules Q & A forums to find an answer that isn't listed in clearly in the rules. Can Ring Veteran commit Lost Memories without the opponent getting a chance to activate Lost Memories against Ring Veteran? If Impetuous is destroyed to its own ability in order to destroy another foundation, can Lost Memories use it's own ability to negate Impetuous' effect even though Impetuous is no longer in play? This confusion stems from the fact that very few players understand how reactions work in UFS to begin with. Magic and Yu Gi Oh players enter UFS and think they can respond to anything you do, and that their response resolves "first." The rules state that each player has a chance to respond to a trigger, but now how the responses themselves resolve, particularly in instance of multiple responses. Is there a point in time where each ability is waiting to resolve, similar to the stack of Magic and Yu Gi Oh? Going down the list of rules issues, I regularly meet opponents who need an explanation why I can use Promo Sakura's form three times, or why her double reversal ability always works. Why is this? Because the rules inserts are inadequate. 10 players tend to give you 10 different rulings for any given situation. Step one to solving this problem would be updating the inserts, in my opinion. Step Two would be making the official tournament rules the official precedent, instead of the controversial rules boards questions which have been overturned before. Also, it would be nice to be able to go to section X.Y. in a printed rules sheet instead of having to go to the Q & A forums to solve a dispute during a tournament.

#2 - Multiplayer Design

UFS is intended for one on one play, but as is the case with any game worth the paper it's printed on, groups of people will get together and want to play UFS in a multiplayer format. As the de facto voice of this subset of players, I have to say STG is really making it hard for these groups to play together. Why is this? How many times do I read the writing of an STG staff member telling us UFS is our game and we can do whatever we can with it, but then they continue to design cards that ignore the fact that all over the world people want to have a Brawl, and are still confused by cards that read "your opponent does X," instead of "choose an opponent(/player), that opponent does X..." In the same set we have cards that read "each player" and "both players." Why is this? Can't a standard be made? On top of this, Brawls are allowed as sanctioned events, and yet we have no official set of rules besides and an obscure and aging post lost somewhere in the vast archives of the Q & A forums. This particular point hits me pretty close to home, and I have the strongest feelings about it, as you might infer.

#3 - The Rich get Richer

I've read that the UFS tournament system is structured so that it rewards the greatest number of players possible and not just the top 1% elite. This is why STG refuses to offer cash prizes. This notion, however, seems to be quite flawed. Unlike most games, UFS cards have a whopping 5 rarities: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Super/Ultra Rare, and Promo. Now, anyone with any experience at grassroots-level tournament play can tell you that the same people win their tournaments over and over again. Naturally, these players walk away with choice promos every week, and have more leverage against the average player when negotiating trades, because most players will never win that Hugo, or that 9 HS Galford or that Mina, whenever she comes out. On top of that, these players tend to have the ability to invest larger amounts of resources into UFS, buying playsets of the best ultra rares like Start Over off the secondary market at exorbitant prices like $30 a card. Because these cards are so rare, even players who spend money on booster packs regularly have almost no chance of opening these cards, let alone opening a playset. So the average noob has to hope that his tournament provides random "handout" promos in order to get even a chance of receiving one that's tournament worthy, and then has to find a noob who is more of a noob than himself and hope to God that that noob has a card he needs that's too expensive for him to get from the tourney rats and hope to God again that that player hasn't already been ripped off by those players. Everyone knows that Promo characters are some of the best characters in the game, one look at the top tier of worlds will tell you that. A lot of people feel like they might never get their hands on the ones they've seen, like Nakoruru, Cody, or Tira. Even if they do, then they have to figure out a way to get the Ultra Rares to make the deck work. My point is the 3 "rare" classifications is far too much. Promo cards should not be cards that the average player can't get in a booster pack. They should be available to everyone through random distribution. This wouldn't make them any less valuable as tournament prizes so long as they are as good as they have been in the past. At the very least, you could make "booster pack" characters competitive enough to win you a few tourneys.

#4 - 8 Card Sideboards are too small

This is more of a personal problem that myself and a few other players share as deck designers. It seems that the sideboard for UFS is so agonizingly small that you can only fit 1, maybe 2 relevant cards in it. 3 if you're a telepath that knows exactly what everyone else is playing. A sideboard is a player's tool to prepare himself against specific matchups. As it stands, the UFS 8 card sideboard can prepare you at best for 1, maybe 2 matchups that your main deck can't handle or handles poorly against. The benefits of a larger sideboard would be that you can prepare for a larger number of contingencies. You can also become especially tricky by using your sideboard to transform your deck, say into another character, another strategy. Wouldn't it be amazing if your control deck could sideboard to become an aggro deck in the control/control matchup? Think about how many draws this could save! Imagine you are discard control game 1, with the option of siding out all your discard for another strategy altogether when your opponent sides in all his anti-discard. The advantages of a larger sideboard are enormous, and the drawbacks seem almost nonexistent. This should be an issue warranting serious consideration, as there are so many valid strategies out there right now, and no way to prepare for them all. The depth of strategy a larger sideboard would provide would also help to silence those that think UFS is won and lost on a coin flip.

#5 - Too many sets are coming out too fast

I know I'm not the only person who has trouble keeping up with new set releases. On balance, I know STG needs to make some money. We've been told that 4 sets a year are pretty standard in the cardboard business, but the fact is that UFS really releases 8 sets a year, two at a time. Not only does this divide attention between product, because every gamer is forced to decide whether to spend money on the Soul Calibur set or the new Street Fighter set, but to add insult to injury, as soon as we get a chance to open up a new set, previews for the next set have already started on the message boards! I haven't even gotten my hands on a set spoiler for Fortune and Glory, and already we have Darkstalkers previews! And I just bought that new Battle Pack!

#6 - Misnumbered, Misprinted, Renamed, and Errata'd Card Functions

It's bad enough that we have cards like Green/Beginner's Luck, and Jab/Quick Elbow, but then we have cards like Leave at Dawn that have two different printings, one with a second ability, one without. To make matters worse, there are two different cards named Dark Hado. How is this not confusing? UFS is starting to gain widespread popularity. Its name is starting to pop up on the big gaming sites like Starcitygames, Wizards, and Gleemax. If UFS wants to eat at the big kids' table it should start acting like one. Why are so many cards errata'd into a completely different functionality? If they are so powerful, do the responsible thing and ban them. If they don't need to be banned, do they need to be errata'd? Probably not. This of course refers to Adon, Abyss, and One Armed Manuevers, who in all honesty are merely a shadow of their former selves. In the case of Abyss, that shadow is barely recognizable, let alone playable. The latest blunder is the misnumbering of Ivy cards so that it is possible for one to open an uncommon as a rare. Also, a number of players in my local shop have opened characters and foil cards with text and images from other games imprinted on them. That just seems sloppy. I think this point ties in directly with number 5. Slow down. Get it right the first time, and if you do make a mess, clean it up properly.

#7 - Lopsided Game Balance

It seems like STG is spinning UFS on little poles, constantly moving back and forth to keep each part spinning. It seems, however, like STG is always one step behind. Problem cards, or strategies appear with the release of each new set, like Whereabouts Unknown with its momentum generation, leaving us only a handful of strategies to defend against it during the set it's printed in. It seems to be the common line of thought at STG that if a powerful strategy arises in X set, we'll just print Y number of cards to hose it in set Z. Instead of presenting us a balanced game with each new set, new sets seem to be part band-aid, part new problem. Sometimes the hose is so overwhelming, that entire decks are killed on the spot, instead of allowing an environment where powerful decks can exist together as equals. This probably also ties in to number 5, and I probably wouldn't be alone when I say that the sets do not feel like they have been playtested properly by the highest caliber gamers. One thing that would help playtesting: take the names off the character cards. It would eliminate bias in deck construction.

#8 - Character Imbalance

As I mentioned earlier, Promo characters are where it's at. If your character doesn't have a P in the set number, it probably isn't as good as one that does. There are of course, highly valid exceptions, but that's exactly what they are, exceptions. I know that not every character can be Nak, or Cody, or Yun-Seong, but every character should at least be playable in some form. Every character should have playability. My favorite examples, of course, are the two Terrys. While they are nowhere on the tournament scene, both characters are extremely well designed and actually quite playable because of their powerful abilities that are not necessarily abusive. The worst part of this point, however, is that some players may never get a playable version of their favorite characters (Raphael, Dudley, Balrog, etc.) while others get three very powerful ones (Ibuki). To be fair, STG seems to have taken notice and has made characters like the new Mai, Ivy and Cervantes which seem to me like a step up from older versions. Right now, though, it seems there is almost no chance for a player to get a tournament staple out of a booster pack, excepting of course, Yun-Seong.

Conclusion

UFS may never change, and that's fine with me as well. I went to great lengths to build this list, making phone calls and sending out emails to gamers around the world for their thoughts and opinions, and still could only mount 8 valid points when I wanted 10. This, of course, is a good sign. Keep in mind, I'm not complaining, I love UFS. I see these points as things to consider for the future, a way of improving the game, and namely, increasing the value of the booster pack. As it stands, the sets come out so fast I have no incentive to buy boosters, only to trade with casual players who do and save myself some money. Next year, we might have 300 people at worlds. If nothing else, why not offer them the best game possible?

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