The Centre: What I think of the current meta game's stratergies.

I like what this does,
for more than you think.

Ever since dungeon world was released, I have been seeing less and less situations where a monster in the centre actually helps. This trend can easily be shown in the 3 biggest meta game decks, Dragon, Dungeon and Danger. Dragon has multiple forms of its decks, but the two most popular right now are Thunder Knights and Jackknife, and even Sky Knights, as bad as they are, still count on an open centre and they are the newest archetype for dragon world. Dungeon uses Glory Seeker and other Adventurers weapons to both provide a target for Tetsuya and Tasuku and get that extra damage in. Danger was the original open centre deck, but before EB02 even they needed a centre monster, but as soon as they got the set, they changed from having a centre monster about 45% of the time to having a centre monster only on turn 1 or 2 just to stall for a weapon. My current Danger build only uses a centre monster if its Wall Lizard turn 1 or if I'm up against Seiger and I have Golem. These situations surprisingly come often enough to mix up a few of the games, but are not something I rely on for most games. The main reason for this change of play with most decks is because Dungeon paved the way to consistent 8 damage penetrate with an impact cheap enough to finish the job and not only that, but the impact was searchable. Scary if you have a monster in the centre, but relatively easy to deal with if you have open centre nulls like green dragon shield and battle aura circle. This is a worrying trend.

First lets see how it got to this. Shields were powerful, but most of the time they were used to block direct attacks. This early game mentality stuck with allot of players for quite a while. Penetrate was powerful because of this but the most common source of it was Danger, which due to the lack of support was hardly played. Set after set not much changed in this aspect except for Katana world and Ancient world pushing the penetrate power a little further, but not enough to change how players acted. I don't know if the creators knew it or not, but Penetrate was, and still is, the most powerful ability in the game, and no other world would reinforce that fact than Dungeon world. While double and even triple Penetrate was still a thing before Dungeon, Dungeon gave consistency to that strategy. With Tasuku and Tetsuya, high crit Penetrate in a link attack became a normal thing. Surprisingly this even boosted Danger's and Dragons power without their new support, because anything that could deal without a centre could deal with these high impact attacks. Defensive decks became weaker, and this killed many decks. As good as magical goodbye was at stoping Dungeon, if they didn't have it that deck was destroyed, well at least wizards were, I'm not too sure about 72 Pillars. After all this, Danger got a new set, and it reinforced the no centre mentality, and the shields pushed this further, along with move and all the new weapons Danger and Dragon got, an Item reliant battle style spread through the game like wild fire. So what does Set 4 do?

As much as I like this card,
I hate what this does to the game.

Bring in a new weapon reliant world, Legend World. While not as scary as Dungeon or Danger, Legend looks to provide just the right amount of defensive spells and a whole armoury worth of different weapons, most of them being Single Rares and Uncommons. Heck there is even a sword as a buddy. Darkness Dragon world is allot more subtle in its open centre game play, even flat out ignoring it in some of their decks. After testing Darkness Dragon World, due to all their counter destruction, their one Turtle and the fact that they only really have 1 relevant item allows them to maintain a centre if the opposing deck isn't penetrate based. This basically means any world that isn't Danger or Dungeon can be walled somewhat by Darkness Dragon World, even with their low defence overall. As Black Dragons, so far, are very slow, you need all the defence you can get, and both the turtle and their spells give you that. While this is only initial thoughts on the little testing I have done, its something I think will be relevant for the metagame. Another thing to note is that Spectral Strike is like a Penetrate that works anywhere, and this is important as it allows player to be a bit more calm about putting monsters in the centre as the same result is going to happen no matter where they put their monster, so why not try and protect the centre and make it harder to take damage? Now if it weren't for the fact that Death's Shadow Dive makes that point mute and same goes for the mind control impact, then we would have something. I want more subtlety in not having a centre, more situations where the risk of having an open centre is an actual risk rather than the way the game is played, and Purgatory Knights might push that. If Purgatory Knights is the multiple attack based Archetype their two main cards have made it to be (even if one of those is a dragon world card) then we may see the centre being a reliable way to play again, as double attack is easier to defend against with a monster than any Penetrate attack is.

So if you have any of your own thoughts on this open centre based gameplay, please post them bellow, but for now, these are my thoughts so far. Ill see you all next time.