The Singapore World Championships were held over the weekend, on the 26th (Friday) and 27th (Saturday) of October 2012 for the Japanese and English formats respectively. The event was held at the Peridot room at the Singapore Expo, and like A.C.M.E. IV held earlier this year, there was a huge turnout! I took part in the tournament together with my younger cousin and a couple of friends. Though only one of us made it to the top 8, we all had a great time shopping, playing and picking up the freebies. Check out the rest of this post for a few pictures and more information about the event.
For the English format, there were a total of 6 blocks of players, with approximately 72 players in each block. If you do the math, that’s 432 players for the English format alone! Interestingly, there were registration numbers running upwards of 500, so the actual figure might be much higher. I heard that the Japanese format had more than 600 players. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the start of the queue!
The first quarter of the registration queue for the English format – the queue was split into four parts all over the venue.
Although the tournament stated registration would be open at 10 a.m., players came as early as 7.30 a.m. just to secure their spots. While there were no explicit limits imposed on registration, the organisers had to turn away players who came on Friday because they just did not have enough resources to cater to that many people. I heard that they ran out of slots by 9.30 a.m. on Friday, but thankfully my friends and I came early enough on Saturday to nab spaces.
Guests from Bushiroad who love making players say: “Stand up the Vanguard!”
There weren’t any Vanguard celebrities this time like Professor O but we did have the usual suspects from Bushiroad who opened the event with a nice little speech, thanking the players for their support.
Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the inside of the competition hall but it was huge enough to fit every participant. Spectators had enough room to walk around and observe games and it was a pleasant environment to play in. What was really nice was that after the first few rounds, players could go back in to observe the remaining matches, or just use the tables to hang out and play games.
As luck would have it, they began the first round by matching participants in sqeuential order, which meant that yes – my friends and I started playing against each other 😦 I had to play against my own cousin, with the deck that I helped him modify the night before! I lost my first round to him after he drew into double-triggers two turns in a row. No shame in losing to your ‘own’ deck I guess? :p
In any case, I dropped out of the tournament after the second round. While I did dominate that round, I didn’t want to keep on playing as I was getting really hungry, and I wouldn’t be able to make the AFA event even if I did qualify for the top 4. I gave my best wishes to my cousin and left to collect my promotional cards and goodie bag, along with two of my friends ^^.
In the end, only one of us made it to the top 8 with a soul-less OTT deck (I might write up about that list soon if I have the time), although he failed to make it to the top 4 thanks to his ‘special’ tech card backfiring on him at the last minute. Suffice to say that if you are playing an OTT soul-less deck, you might want to avoid riding or mixing cards from other clans or you will not be able to use your OTT abilities. Still, he had a perfect win streak going before that, so he was pretty happy all the same.
We ended the day with some great shopping. One of my friends picked up a huge bunch of Japanese SP cards at great prices, while I finally got my hands on the SDD cloth playmat and a nice Vanguard album. These also entitled me to an autographed card from a Weis-Scharwz artist. While I don’t play WS, it was nice to get an autographed card!
SDD cloth playmat (Left), Vanguard 9-slot binder (Centre), Autographed W-S Card (Right)
The goodie bag was pretty awesome as well – everyone got a nice little cardboard storage box with the words “Fighter’s Road 2012” on the cover, as well as a limited edition deck box.
Storage Box (Top), Carrier bag (Centre), Deck Box (Bottom)
We ended the day with a few tag battle bouts. We alway wanted to try it out but never got around to it and wow, it’s actually pretty fun! If you haven’t tried it out yet, go grab a few friends and do so. You can find the rules here. It’s quite easy to pick up and you will definitely get loads of laughs trying to co-ordinate your attacks and guards.
Kagero (Goku / DotE) vs Gold Paladin (Garmore-SDD / Garmore-Ezel)
A late-game tag battle is just an epic waiting to happen.
Well, that about rounds up this short little ‘report’ on the tournament. Look out for the deck-lists of the eventual champions on the official Vanguard site here.
Thanks to all of my regular readers for checking in despite the lack of updates. I know I owe you guys more articles and lists and they will be coming soon. I became unexpectedly busy the last few weeks and only just got a breather to get back to writing. Formatting is really tedious when you’re a one-man show.
Keep those comments coming! I always love to read what you guys have to say about the articles, the site, or just about your own experience with the game.
Magmario
The Magma Circle 
The artist who drew that character was a guest at the event. Was that actually signed by her or was it a printed signature?
Signed by hand, we all queued up for it after getting a voucher from buying at least $30 worth of merchandise.