We've been doing block three at my store in the Shwa for at least three months. It's actually proven quite interesting to see the mix of toons being used as opposed to block 2 where everyone used the same thing every week. Example:

More often than not the starting lineup for characters played by folks at tournies:

Shajir: Evil Ibuki/Order Yun Seung mill/aggro (depending on the day and deck)

AwesomeDhalsim: Evil Ibuki/J.Talbain (at the very end of our block 2 lives)

Link: Xangiua in any incarnation

Me: All Alex with fire attacks

Adam (who's forum name I dunno): Water Seung Mina rush

Andrew (again who's forum name i dunno): Order Yun Seung aggro

Folks like Morning Demon and Loki 5k when able to play usually varied it up. Near the end of Block 2 Loki started to play a Block 3 Akuma deck, saying that every major tourney from then on out was block 3, and it kinda shifted all our thoughts untill eventually we were all experimenting with various block three decks. As such, our tourney spread a couple of weeks ago looked like this:

AwesomeDhalsim: J.Talbain

Me: Yoshitora

Andrew: Terry

Adam: Guy

Link: Zi Mei (the ballsy guy played Kazuki last week)

As you can see, block three has blessed us with a plethora of good characters, and we're experimenting with a LOT of them. Sir Shajir built a Kyoshiro deck off Order that drew an INSANE amount of cards and then Self Sacraficed his opponant's board away. Loki is working on fine tuning a Talbain deck until he gets b%^&ed, while Morning Demon is builting up a Basara deck that quite frankly scares the bejesus outta me. We also have a new player who shows up when he can playing a Sagat deck. So needless to say, our meta is actually doing fairly strong, and I fully think it's because of the block three changeover. A lot of the junk from block two is gone, namely stuff like the Curse Broken, SusieQ (YAY NO MORE IBUKI!), and Chain Throw/Absurd combos have opened up the meta quite a bit. Symbols such as Earth, Chaos and *gasp* Good/Void are finally being considored mid tier given the fact their primary abilities (Chaos- Momentum Gen, Good the anti meta symbol, Void discard etc etc) aren't being stopped by one or two power cards.

Now don't get me wrong, there are a LOT of problems with block three, many of which have been discussed on this board, mostly by me. But I think with whatever SotG we get next, and the next wave of errata/ba%^&ngs we get, the game will be fixed just that little bit more.

Cheers,

Brad

I honestly think block 3 is a very health format except the for wolfman. That was my first draft of the kyoshiro deck, and i'm still missing some defensive components like cutting edges and ami's assistance in the deck, makai high noble, but it shaped up fairly good overall. Order has soo much draw right now it's not even funny, I just have to find some more split cards in order to make my kills a bit faster and more consistant if my hard lock plan doesn't go through. I think I have a horrible match vs talbain though, but I might be able to out draw him and out control him if I can draw enough.

I won't know cuz we're legacy here, but it seems cool.

I love legacy, but no one here plays legacy, so I'm SoL...
It's such a hard format to actually play properly, and a lot of things are viable, it's very skill intensive.

sir_shajir said:

Surprisingly, Target "I only play aggro decks" X has been playing with the Draw Ton of Cards / Self-Sacrifice thing, and while he uses another character, it's still pretty efficient.

the one major problem in b3 is agrro. it barely exists. control is just so good that even symbols like fire which used to always be an agro symbol is now controll. b2 throws some more agro into the equition.

trane said:

**Waves Hand** I play B3 fire aggro. Fire Zi Mei normally. but its Kazuki right now (i just wanna mess around with him). The Zi Mei deck can usually kill by T3 and is FAR from control