Ben’s BSF Duluth Run and the nature of BSF Top 8 Lists
Hello! My name is Ben, and I played Revue Starlight to BSF Duluth and went 7-2, with my team ending in third place. I promise this is much different than how I personally felt and performed at BSF Houston, when I played Revue Starlight and went 3-6, with my team ending in third place.
There’s been a lot of hubbub in online Weiss discourse™ about all of the “random” lists making top 8 at BSF’s around the world, mine included, so I wanted to talk about both my list and run and why it reflects how different lists perform across the world during spring season, and why BSF top lists seem so different than BCS top lists sometimes.
What's Ben playing?
I wanted to play Revue Starlight at Springfest. With ATLA and CSM by my side, I wanted to take the opportunity to try and get a Revue Starlight list to perform and make it onto Weiss Tea Time. Surely my team would perform well, and as one of my teammates said, if I just had a 50% win rate they should be able to take care of the rest.
With this in mind, I'd been playtesting pants/door RSL since about the start of the year. The Houston list has clear flaws (and ended 3-6) and so, up until the week before Duluth, I'd fine-tuned the list into one that took advantage of scrying with the level 0 giraffe from the movie set, had outs to many different board states, and nearly always was able to field the full finishing board.
Then I threw it all away for my waifu and some math.
Initially as a joke, I made a version of this deck that removed many of the nice things (giraffe, double trigger, 1 bomb) in favor of jamming in 3 of my waifu, Mahiru Tsuyuzaki, and 2 copies of the standby climax to just play her at level 2 instead of Karen. This came with an extra assist to make it easier to incidentally standby it out at level 1, and 4 copies of the level 0 Maya Tendo bottom deck bomb because:
A. I had 20 level 2 or higher cards in the list at this point and,
B. I didn't want to think too hard.
One test game happens where I mill 90% of the deck out and don't see a door climax to salvage, and the climax setup changes from 4/2/2 to 3/2/3 on a whim and a prayer. Initially, I was just gonna play the deck for fun for two or three games and then resleeve my “real” deck before we flew to Georgia. Was it funny to have a 10k damage scry hand encore guy at level 2? Sure. How much did one instance of damage scry matter? Unsure. And while it was nice to have to think less about how to construct a level 2 board besides,
- Have the standby in hand
- Play the standby
Surely the damage scry benefits were less than a real board right?
Wrong.
As is now public, the good Dr. Jon and I had just finished making a script to get the odds of Aki being lethal. It was horrifying. 60%+ of death at 3-0? ~45% of death even from 2-4? It was demoralizing. But wait, how much would defensive scry help me survive Aki? In Houston I'd fought 4 CSM players to a horrid result. Any buff to my chances at surviving was acceptable. So I sat down with the doctor to create a properly functioning defensive scry function (check top of deck, send to top deck or waiting room, performed at the next available check timing after damage is taken) and we ran the numbers.
Because of how defensive scry is worded and check timings work, if the icy tail burned multiple times, even though I only had a single Mahiru on stage, I would be able to scry for each burn one that the icy tail inflicts after all of the burn ones are resolved. And apparently, to my surprise, a single copy of Mahiru (defensive scry) on the board lowered my odds of death by Aki by ~15-25% across most reasonable deck states.
Fuck it, we ball. What's Springfest for if not for playing your waifu to victory?
The Actual Performance
As it turns out, many other players shared the “Fuck it, we ball” sentiment. My full run was:
- Azur Lane: 8 Two Souls (cats and rabbits)
I blocked the two souls early and bottom decked cats with the Maya bombs. He bled his hand to death and I won the war of attrition by having plussing cards.
- Overlord: Door/Bar Ainz (played by someone for the first time)
He was reading all of his cards while playing them, but he did stick me to 3-0 while he was at 1-5. Unfortunately, this was followed up by him eating 9 damage and joining me at level 3 without a bar to his name.
- Seven Deadly Sins: Stock Soul/Pants Hendrickson
A heavy damage trading sort of game, but I ended up milling the last two 2/1 Karens from the deck while drop salvaging for the 3/2 Hikaris, guaranteeing that I wouldn't have the reach to make a real finishing attempt. In hindsight, I could've attempted to single Karen and accepted the packet of 2 damage instead of 3-4, but because he was at 2-4 I wanted to guarantee that, if he blocked a single packet, that the others would be enough for lethal.
- Date A Live: 8 Choice Kotori
A fairly standard game, and an important lesson was learned when he downgraded my Mahiru with hand encore and I hand encored her. After double triggering choice and milling out most of his climaxes on a fresh deck, he lost to single Karen.
- Slime: Pants/Book Shizu
I was able to standby the 2/1 Karen that scrys at level one, revealing two books and a card on top of his deck for 2 turns in a row. However, he didn't track his climaxes well and left me a 12 card clean deck to swing into with my full finisher setup.
- Guilty Gear: Standby/Door Sol
Somehow, I drew out 4 climaxes in my opening hand, drew out a 5th one post mulligan, and still managed to stabilize with a full hand and board at 2-1 while he had a 3 card hand at 2-1. Standby doesn't push damage well, and Junna is a very good freezer, freezing his only Sol in the back row to prevent any chance of him finishing me.
- Chainsaw Man: Stock Soul/Bar
Funnily enough, this player fought me at our locals 3 days before Duluth. Unfortunately, she ran face first into a visibly sculpted anti-early counter and ended up being pushed to high 2 with no resources. I was able to end the game when she was at 2-6 iirc.
- Seven Deadly Sins: Stock Soul/Pants Hendrickson (Same Opponent from Round 3)
Rematch with Long didn't go super hot either lol. I didn't draw or trigger a climax for the entirety of deck one, then immediately drew 1 and triggered 2 on deck 2. I wasn't cancelling super well either, so I got left with leaving him to Riki himself to level 3 and scrying a much needed climax with Henderson to kill me instantly.
- Konosuba: 8 Choice Darkness
Realistically, both of us took this game a little more casually than we should've. He mistakenly thought I needed full board for the anti-early counter when I only needed 4, leaving him down a Darkness after he double triggered choice for no value. Three choice triggers later, and he falls to single Karen finisher.
You might notice that most of these decks aren't exactly what most people would consider top of the meta lists. Most are generally good enough to win games, don't get me wrong, but with a highly resource efficient finisher and a big annoying thing that makes it easier for me to stay alive at level 2, Revue tended to perform pretty well. My only two losses were to Long, the Hendrickson player on the winning team (Shout out to Long). And this is different from solo tournaments in general, I think.
What's so different about Springfest?
By the time you're still in top tables at a singles event, either worse players or worse decks are largely filtered out. In my Duluth singles run last year, the only non “top tier” decks that I fought past round 3 was a revue player that I'd rematch in quarters, and the Adventure Time player that's known for playing Adventure Time in Georgia (Shout out to Anthony). In teams, you might get carried up to the top tables while your record sits in a dumpster.
I did it in Houston, going 2-4 in Swiss, and only winning my quarters match in top 8 to be carried in a backpack to third. In Duluth this year even, the team of 8 standby Bang Dream, 8 pants Loid only Spy, and standard Chainsaw Man in top 8 had records of 2-4, 2-4, and 4-2 in swiss respectively. Timing the wins and losses correctly by sheer luck can keep your team record alive and well.
This is why looking at the top 8 teams in Springfest without context is nearly meaningless. What you can generally tell from looking at results is 1. The Spike deck of the season 2. What other decks are probably generally good and 3. Who got lucky/played well with non-meta lists probably into other non-meta lists. I was horrified at first to see other Revue players message me about the Houston list asking to copy it, because it was horrible and I'd wish I could've put a note on it that said “please don't play this”.
Chainsaw Man is a good deck. Anyone telling you otherwise is deluding themselves. This reflects in that it's in 5-6 of every top 8 team of every springfest tournament. Revue Starlight? Chloe/Ollie Hololive? Grisaia? I'm not too sure about that. When the BCS season starts again, and the people at the top tables and the top 8 brackets only consist of people that are x-2 and up, that's when I think that we'll get a clearer picture of “what is meta”.
This is also partly why I think Mjurran has been strangely absent from some tournaments. Many people treated Mjurran decks as a sort of BDIF in 2023 BCS, so it's perhaps no surprise that many spike players switched to CSM, the new spike deck in town. But a simpler answer is likely that less people in general are playing the deck. All of DFW’s Slime players pivoted to either a set they liked more or CSM. It's not hard to imagine that other Mjurran players did the same. The second place team in Duluth had a slime player that switched to Shizu because he liked how that deck functioned better. In a game as small as Weiss is right now, all of these small decisions by the people going to tournaments affect what the field truly looks like.
If Springfest was only attended by tryhards attempting to win with the best possible decks, there would be more Overlord, Gura, and CSM players than there already are flooding the tables. But that's not what everyone sees Springfest as as a tournament series. Maybe it's an opportunity to get your friend into Weiss in a team environment. Maybe you wanna make a full team of Power Up set decks and send it down the lane. Maybe you just wanna take your waifu/husbando and see how well they do.
Thus, the top 8 of a given Springfest tournament, more than anything else, reflects generally who the best players were that are present at the tournament, more so than the best decks. Good players can skill check weaker players even while playing worse decks. And while good players may tend to play good decks, they won't exclusively do so. That's why I'll never be surprised to see the Darkness player doing well, since he's just a good pilot of Darkness.
The effects get even more pronounced in smaller tournaments or tournaments where players have less access to the total card pool. Why did Gun Gale Online do well in the UK? Because that player has been one-tricking it since release and fine tuned his deck against most of the other players in the tournament. Why did the third place player in Bulgaria get there with Batman Ninja? Because there were 9 players and they likely were good enough to leverage the deck in a way to kill people with re-standers. Why did the Fate player in Manila play such a maniacal looking list? Because it's Springfest, and you have the cards that you have, so why not push your favorite cards and try to have some fun?
Like Steve has said on the podcast many times, in Weiss, people play with their heart. I don't think statement is more true than in Springfest, where if you trade your wins and losses juuuuuust right, you too can make it to the top. But if you're of the mind to pull up Weiss Tea Time, net deck a random top 8 deck (perhaps the third place Revue player at Houston), and expect to clean up your locals, I would think twice, as it may not be the deck you think it is.