So, as anybody keeping track of the Sheffield Regionals thread will know, Hewittzil, Son Gopaul and I had an interesting conversation about different playgroups and metagames in the UK. After reading Tuesday's thread about Canadian Nationals (where people from outside the UK have started to post now) I thought it might be interesting to ask how players view the metagame at the moment. So, who do you think the top characters are? What are the best symbols for each deck type and why?

Also, I can finally get regular access to the forums so I want to make a thread

I'll post on here myself next time I log on to the forum, so for now I'll just mention I still think the entire environment revolves around Blood Runs True and Feline Spike and one of my first considerations for a tournament deck is how it can beat them. Oh, nd that the most broken character in existance is Akuma. He's on par with Tycho

oi leave akuma alone

i have to say he is a very strong character but i will hold all my veiw's on this till after the potm which will be our first magor event since the latest sets release. i want to see how it will change everything which i think it will.

on the other side vega is pretty broken and he has the best attack in game personally should be banned

I'd say it was fairly difficult to pinpoint what the metagame actually is in the UK, as everybody seems to play different things. Control isn't as prevalent as I might have thought around here. A lot of Colchesters players seem to prefer playing aggressive decks instead.

I held two tournaments over the weekend, one on Friday and another on Saturday, and Colchesters' metagame at least is extremely varied. Although there seemed to be more Aggro decks running around than Control, including Blanka, Felicia, Guy, Ragnar, Astrid, Tira, and, for once, not Chun-Li . The more prominent decks however seemed to be more control oritentated, or at least hybrid. In both tournaments, Order hybrid and Evil control did seem to be more successful. Hanzo is also a character well worth mentionning in any meta.

Having looked at the Regionals results, it seems like control decks are more likely to do well, although Matt Hewitts Chun-Li deck seems to spit in the face of that (although I haven't seen the deck, I could be wrong). With Vega and Akuma having run rampant around the plae, it seems like the longer you can hold out, the better.

I would agree in saying that we'd know more when PotM rolls around though.

My views of the UK meta stand as far as what was said in our conversation. Chun-Li dominates in Colchester, yet if we had an Akuma like when Mark (Tuesday) showed up at our League Finale, he would be a little stronger.

We have a lot of players trying out the new characters, including Ragnar, Astrid, Ivy, Astaroth, Algol, Siegfried, Tira and Hilde, (sorry if I missed anyone's new character deck here) and all seem pretty strong (especially Ivy who won the Friday tournament). I'm going to try out Rashotep sometime as I've only recently noticed how good The Double Crown of Egypt is, but I need to take cards from Hanzo to build Rashotep. I'm thinking of building a 2nd deck for something on the side, if they dont wanna play Hanzo. Ideas include Mitsurugi7 with Ivy's support, or Yang off Fire.

WTF? What's with all the comments about Vega? It's only left Sheffield once!!!!!

At the moment I think that control is much stronger than aggro. It doesn't help that the best form of aggro (other then character-specific aggro, e.g. Hanzokick) is Feline Spike which is an ultra-rare which is virtually impossible to find.

I've also found that it is very difficult to make a control deck which beats other control decks, as the war is basically won by whoever sacrifices the most anti-aggro meta from their main deck in favour of more control cards.

I'd say the top characters are Akuma, Sakura, Chun-Li, Hanzo, Gill and Xi Mei, but it will be interesting to see what is played at PotM. This was meant to be a bigger post but I've got to start work

Son Gopaul said:

Ivy didn't win that tournament, she was winning after the second round, but Aaron left Matt in charge of the deck, and then played against me and lost. At the end of the swiss, Kyle ad I were tied for first place. Also, Alex has rebuilt his Chun-Li deck, so we'll all need to be living in fear of that again

In our meta it still seems Order control and Hanzokick are in control.

myself as hanzo and nick as Gen seem to win every tourney now that everyone else is building up their agrro decks after set 12.

We've built decks like nightmare, cervantes, ivy, siegfried, nino and the like but they're all still inconsitent despite what set 12 gave us in terms of aggro.

My point is, even with all these spangly new attacks ( thankyou joe) Control is still dominant. Anyone who challenges that claim should play either me or Nick then get back to me on it.

My bad, Joe. Anywhos, I've changed my mind about Misturugi, he doesnt have the draw power that Ivy does. I'm going to build Rashotep anyways, but a little differently after seeing what Earth really has to offer (such as the obvious Criminal Past - Battle Prowess idea that I've only just noticed).

Rashotep's amazing since he basically has a reprint of Chain Throw XD

Out of curiosity, does everyone who plays Order in Cornwall have playsets of Ira Spinta and/or Defender? They're impossible to find in this part of the country, so I'd assumed it was the same everywhere else which is why I hadn't seen many Order decks, etc.

Speedsta said:

We're in the same boat here in Plymouth as you Ross - I think I have 3 Defenders and 2 Ira Spinta's to my name and know of no others in the play group. Order just isn't played in Plymouth

We're kinda lucky in Colchester, a few of us have playsets of Spinta and Defender (myself owning a playset of Defender and spare copies of Spinta), so it does get run here quite a lot, albeit not often as the primary method of kill. More often than not, the Defenders around town (including my own) get spread around so that people are running 1,2 or 3 copies of it as a secondary kill option (Mega Spike has more than one use, ya know ) rather than making a 'Defender Loop deck'. This is mostly due to the fact that Defender has become noticably weaker with Set 12.

Kill conditions in Colchester do tend to revolve around the character being played rather than the cards within it, with a lot of the killers being commons/uncommons. Ricky's Hanzo deck using Fei Longs Forward Kick, my younger brothers Blanka using Punch combos and Fire Kick, the Fio deck ran at Exeter by Paul also used Fire Kick (along with Defender Loop, admittedly). Melancholic Mercurius is also an exceptionally popular kill condition run in Colchester. We can't all have Menuette Dances and Feline Spikes after all!

Man, you guys are totally missing out on Great Gerdenheim. It's like a Shadow Banishment, but better!

O_o