Rumors Abound

The time of the year that every duelist hates and loves almost simultaneously is ban list season.  The ban list shapes our format for what we will have to deal with for the following three months.  The ban list has a dramatic effect on card values, clearly on playability, and can have a dramatic impact on the format itself.  The current ban list season is like none we have had in recent memory.  As I am writing this, tomorrow will be Wednesday, September 24, 2014, and the ban list still has yet to be released.  Yesterday evening, we got an official update from Konami, via their Official YuGiOh TCG Facebook page, which confirmed that the list would be posted later this week (well thanks tips, we already knew that!).

The effect that the list being so late has is pretty significant.  A number of players will be preparing for YCS Dallas, which is less than two weeks away from today’s date.  I simply cannot imagine what the secondary market will look like at that YCS for specific cards players are looking for last minute.  As I am not going to YCS Dallas this year, I am a little less concerned with this fact.  The more annoying fact for me is that it has allowed for people to once again create obviously fake lists.  Fake ban lists were much more frustrating when the OCG and TCG shared the same ban list as the release of the Japanese magazine V-Jump contained the copy of the ban list upon release.  It was at this time that it seemed as though every Japanese person lost the ability to operate a camera, and most pictures we did get looked as though they were shot with an early cell phone camera with the lights off.  Needless to say, when the lists were separated one of the clear benefits was that it would be pretty difficult to make a fake list as one could just go to the website and debunk it as fake. 

It seems as though because people are getting impatient with the list, they are constantly trolling with photoshopped versions of the list, RickRolls, etc.  There are rumors that popular players throughout the game entertain, such as those posted by Jarel this past weekend stipulating that Shock Master and Trishula were to be limited to one.  While the rumors are clearly more interesting, it still means very little until the actual list comes out.  While it may have us dreaming of Wind-Up formats from the past, that is all they are, dreams.  Nothing more, nothing less.

While we can argue and protest Konami until we are blue in the face to get the list posted, it will do little good and we would just be wasting our time.  Rather than creating fake lists trolling everyone, read a book, go outside, go to locals, play a video game, or watch television, and stop wasting our time.