Goat Format Championship 17 Top 8 Interviews

Today we had the largest Goat Format Championship tournament (and the largest online Goat Format event period) ever! 266 players entered for a chance at over $1,000 in prizes and the following eight came out on top! Read on for some stellar insight from the finalists of the most successful modern tournament our format has seen yet! ​

Sdlkilla

Name:N/ALocation:Chula Vista Occupation:Structural helper ​Age:30

How did you prepare for today's event? Did you practice with a specific person or team?Prepared with team rampage.What deck did you play today and why?Warrior is the best deck in my opinion.What decks or players were you looking forward to playing against?Warrior.What decks or players were you NOT looking forward to playing against?Chaos Turbo.What card had been overperforming for you today?Xing Zhen HuWhat has been your favorite moment of the event so far?Making top eight and hopefully winning it.​

If you could go back, what (if any) changes would you would make to your deck today?​Think deck was solid. ​

How did you prepare for today's event? Did you practice with a specific person or team?I haven't touched this game in six months. Practicing barely matters when it's a legacy format. There was one round where I faced a deck I hadn't seen before (Cat Control), so I Googled what it was. Thankfully, my opponent (Nano) had written an entire article about his deck.What deck did you play today and why?Chaos Turbo. It's the best advantage-generating engine, and it's the deck I can play closest to perfectly. But whoever named it "turbo" has misunderstood the deck. I detest that name. Maybe the Jar of Greed version can be thought of as turbo. The other version is so different and plays with an entirely different objective.What decks or players were you looking forward to playing against?Looked forward to playing anyone bad. Suboptimal card choices, suboptimal deck choice, suboptimal technical play, suboptimal psychology...anything to make the day easier.What decks or players were you NOT looking forward to playing against?

Slashtap

Name:JohnnyLocation:TexasOccupation:Management Consultant​Age:33

Did not look forward to playing anyone good. I don't want a difficult time. I don't want to put my skills to test. I want easy prizes.Same answer as last year: Sinister Serpent.I love this match from round one because it provides so many teaching points about the nature of mastery and how (poor) mentality shapes (the lack of development of) mastery. Read the chat and observe how this player's mind attaches to the ego. In the face of undesired outcomes, the ego immediately leaps in to protect itself with thoughts about losing to luck. This ensures that he will fail to properly evaluate his own good luck, as well as card choices, deck choice, and technical play. He has some suboptimal card choices, especially post-siding, that made him more fragile to being disturbed by my good luck. CT gets "lucky" more than most decks because it has more lucky synergies. His deck does not have so many synergies, so if we played 1,000 games, it would appear as if I would win more due to "luck" on the microcosm when really I chose the luckier deck on the macrocosm. When the ego attaches to a narrative like "I got luck sacked," it blinds the user to proper evaluating whether they could have improved, regardless of whether it would have affected the individual game. Finally, the broader understanding to consider is that when one chooses to play a game with high variance (as opposed to, say, a fighting game), they enter into a contract in which they agree that they wish for luck to determine certain situations. You can see in the fragility of this player's emotions that he wants the upsides of the contract without its downsides. If you agreed to play YuGiOh, you agreed to accept variance.​Replay: https://www.duelingbook.com/replay?id=6322-38270666I would not have sided certain cards for matchups I didn't end up facing. But this kind of thinking presupposes that my opponents wouldn't change in response to myself changing the past, which I don't think is a safe assumption when you consider the non-Newtonian layer of reality. You cannot alter the select aspects of the past while keeping everything else the same, and if you can truly internalize this assumption (regardless of whether or not it's true), then you'll live a life without regret. Everything that happens, even the mistakes you make that feel so dumb in hindsight and have traumatic consequences, happens for a reason. See through the illusion of regret and you'll see through the illusion of suffering. Refuse to learn from the pain, and it will come back to teach you again.