Worlds Beyond Initial Thoughts

Mahjong gone? Game is dead on arrival (jk).

For the most part, I just want to share my initial impressions on what I saw:

• Minigames disappearing doesn't seem great to me. Mahjong was unironically a great idea, and I think it was probably the one minigame that should have stayed at all costs (fishing/dungeons are whatever). The longer you keep people on your ecosystem, the more opportunities to acquire player engagement and convert to sales/long-term commitment. The whole meta lobby thing is totally worthless now

• SVE Collab - makes sense, definitely something they should do. This is also the second last chance for them to inject players into SVE (Vanguard collab being the other). Good decision, but if it doesn't succeed, then there's no other real avenue in such a competitive TCG market upcoming

• Worlds Prize Pool - Pretty funny that they felt the need to remove the SVE prize card when they're upping the prizing 10x. Worth noting that the prizing is extremely top heavy (see Capcom cup or prev WGPs), so like, if you come 2nd, I think you're only making like 130k USD as opposed to the nearly 700k USD. It's a good change, but as advice from one of the best players in Western Digital SV1, let me tell you, it's not easy to win this AND the prizing structure is too top heavy.

• Release Date in June - Good, looks like we can play it soon!

• Set release - 1.5 month releases for first 4 sets... This is actually really fucked! I think if you want to play competitively in 2025, you are actually going to be forced to spend money. It's fine later on if you play every day, but you won't be winning tournaments easily as F2P.

• Game balance - Seems too fast and may be imbalanced as a result. I expected a slower format where "first person to super evo loses the game." This might still be the case, but when I saw cards like Garyu I realised that the games will probably end turn 9 since these super evos can essentially just go face.

• Game balance - This system reminds me of late-stage SV1, where the power creep was essentially so large that boards almost never stick and I'd have liked to have seen a start where vanillas like Chillwind Yeti are playable.

• Mulligan rework - Can mull up to 4 cards - very good change, this is another aspect where player skill will be tested, as you will need to know exactly what to mulligan. Increased player choice is generally a good thing

• First vs Second: Second gets on-demand pp twice a match now. I found it was often pointless to worry about going 1st vs 2nd in SV because you never had the choice in an actual match anyways. What I'm more excited about is that there is more skill expression when you have to take into account the extra 1pp opponent can get TWICE a match now, and this applies whether you are going first and have to play around it, or if you are second and are playing with the pp boost.

• Worlds qualification - Since it seems to be a 2025 thing, I suspect that the qualification structure will be pretty high-variance (i.e. I don't think the best players will necessarily be the ones to qualify to worlds). I wouldn't be surprised if they did a really scuffed format like 4 tournaments (one each set), have to get top 2 to qualify to a 8-person double elim.

Overall, news was good. Game balance thoughts are preliminary and depends heavily on what the early game cards look like. I suspect that the reason they had to delay the game so much was related to the game balance being off, so, most likely, they fixed it during the delay.

Let's see how it goes.