Predictions and Observations:
Power Plays

Episode Aired: March 26, 2011
This Post Posted: April 1, 2011

Team 5D's has fans! Check out the signs! Didn't see many signs for Team Unicorn; is the crowd entirely on our side, or are the Team Unicorn supporters just hiding?

The *whole* team's geared up; check out the duel-boarding gear on the twins. Are we going to see any behind-the-scenes duel action from anyone other than each team's riders?

Isn't the Circuit... could it possibly be an aerial map of New Domino? Does the location of the duels matter? They're completing an infinity symbol traced in powerful duels on New Domino's streets, if my guess here is right, which explains why no one with their power has attempted this before when these guys have been around a while; can you imagine forming a 'circuit' with only stationary duels? The invention of turbo-dueling made this scheme look a lot more possible, and New Domino's proliferation of turbo-dueling courses made it ripe for the picking on this one. And, looks like the center where the lines cross is the nearly the only untraced spot left; I'd lay money that's the Kaibadome, right there in the center.

Speaking of which, they've been busy with the circuit; where did all those lines come from? When did all that happen? Who *else* has been getting into duels of equal caliber to Jack's that we saw activate the circuit, or what other adventures have the Signers been getting roped into while we weren't looking?

I noticed that the announcer listed each of Team 5Ds' duelists last names, but none of Team Unicorn's. What, they don't have last names? *Are* those their real names or are they maybe dueling pseudonyms, stage names, or something?

This stadium's got a short memory if they let Akiza into this tournament after the last one. Maybe the Directors pulled some strings; after all, I doubt they wanted Team 5D's getting disqualified...

Hey, look at all the familiar faces in the crowd! That's Trudge, Mina, Carly, and the waitress from the cafe, and Bob, Sly, Dex, and the blonde girl. And there's Mr. and Mrs. Izinski elsewhere in the stadium, and Akiza's mom looks about ready to faint *already*, let alone when Akiza steps up to duel next right after Jack started the tournament with a runner accident. Who else might be here? Let's see, what about Martha, Blister, and the kids? What about Rally, Blitz, Tank, and Nervin, who seem to have fallen off the face of the earth?

Hey team losers with the scary marks-- ya know who was the last person to spend a tournament spectating from the doorway just like that? I'll give you a hint; he's the favorite snack of giant glowing lizards everywhere. Who are these crazies anyhow?

So, apparently the whole Trudge-Mina-Jack-Carly triangle is not only live and kickin', it's become more of a tetrahedron; that waitress's showing up at the tournament and getting into arguments with Mina and Carly tells me she's serious about being a contender for Jack's attention. And I'm noticing that Trudge is sitting *right next to Mina* throughout all this, putting up with all this squabbling over Jack. Ya know what Mina said at the beginning of the season about Trudge taking rejection well? Guess where he gets his practice.

And, Carly says she's rooted for Jack *longer* than Mina has. How on Earth does she figure? While Jack was champion, Mina was his handler; seems to me she would've been close to Jack from the moment he reached the City. However, Mina's dithering when we first met her may have suggested more readily than I thought, that she was new to her post, which would mean that, if Carly had been following Jack's duels on her blog since he took the crown, Carly may have been rooting longer. I'd be curious to know more about the complete history of Mina's career in the PSB, 'cause I bet it would be really interesting.

Now I'm talking about the pleasantries exchanged between Jean, Yusei and Crow. Mainly, I want to bring up a point about Yusei saying that they're there "to give all the fans out there a good show." As Yusei's dueling priorities usually rank, this is a bit of a new one on me; last tournament, the big stadium of fans made Yusei nervous, and Jack was the one who liked the fans, not him. Perhaps this says that Yusei's a bit more confident in front of the large crowds than he used to be.

Jean says they've been watching tape for three weeks on Team 5D's and their strategies. Would that mean, then, that the Prelim matches were posted three weeks ago?

Did Jean slip something into Jack's intake vents while they were talking here? After Bruno had finished checking them?

Breo says that Jean gives him "goosebumps" when he says that Team 5D's has no chance at all of winning. Did anyone else find that little moment of character development rather interesting?

"He reminds me of me in a lot of ways..." Jack said of Andre when Andre dueled Yusei. I think, examining this duel, it's worth taking a moment to re-examine that statement. Andre and Jack are both the flashiest and most show-offy of their respective teams; we've seen Andre usually do the talking for Team Unicorn while Jean does a lot of the thinking. Andre seems to be his team's professional face, somewhat; so far, the only duel history we have about Team Unicorn concerns Andre and we know plenty about him. Similarly, Jack's got a pro circuit record several miles long, while Yusei and Akiza have only been known professionally since the Fortune Cup, and Akiza's unknown entirely as a turbo-duelist.

I noticed how Speed World 2 darkened the stadium. It's a bit of a 'sunglasses' effect, or varied, a plot device for lighting. I always thought the purple sky was kind of awesome, but hey, whatever...

So, the overboost system. Is that the same kind of system Crow uses to provide the extra oomph required to use his wings? Is this the first time we've seen this? Jean said that it wasn't "against the rules or anything", but his suggestion made Andre and Breo nervous. Seems perfectly logical to me to make a tradeout between going first and going fast later. If you think you can finish your opponent off before it'll matter, if you think the duel won't take long enough for you to experience the downside to an overboost system, it makes sense. This perhaps also speaks to us that Andre was geared up to hit us hard out of the gate, but not to last for a long time; his losing to Akiza probably won't be that big a deal in terms of Team Unicorn's strategy. In that case, Team Unicorn will have its *second* duelist packing a wallop that's tailor-made for Akiza. More on that later.

What's so special about The Deck? Can't be just that it's counter-power to Jack's power deck. Can't be just that Team Unicorn is finally playing unicorn-themed cards, which, I'd wondered when they'd start doing that. What's so special about it, and is it geared for more than just anti-power?

Thunder Unicorn... cousin of Sunlight Unicorn? Again, will there be some showdown between Luna and one of these guys?

So, in this duel, looks like we're seeing a fairly standard game from Jack; this is his most basic and natural M.O., and yeah, quite predictable I'm afraid. Think he got complacent or something.

Speaking of which, Team Unicorn calls Team 5D's very "predictable". They aren't the first, and so far I agree. They're going to need to bring it more and step it up here. I have confidence, though, that they will.

Andre calls Jack a has-been; it's not just cards that Team Unicorn has been researching, it's how to push buttons. Wonder if he'll have the guts to try calling Akiza a witch?

Andre's finishing speed spell was The End of the Storm! How... poetic... or something. The End of the Storm was definitely a card that represents the 'old Jack', and also signals to us that another duelist is of similar stature; Hunter played it during the Fortune Cup, back when we might actually have thought he was important, and Crow had it in his hand in ep#31, which is what started me thinking that maybe Yusei, Jack, and Crow were all part of a common group or something, lol.

Andre 'safety-lined' Jack! Ouch! I'm noting that Yusei had been about to safety-line Andre the same way in their practice match. Mostly though, just ouch!

A DOA-- Deck of Armor, Defeat on Arrival, Doormat of Antagonist, however you want to spell it, Jack just got creamed to show us, the viewers, that those Unicorns' shimmery horns are sharp! Takes the edge right off our complacency, wouldn'tcha say?

Jack didn't follow the will of his team, didn't trust that they wouldn't be pulling him over for nothing. Right here we saw Team 5D's fail to function as a single unit, the same thing we were struggling with in "Will the Real Jack...".

Among my opening thoughts: two serious crashes in two weeks-- can't we *ever* catch a break? How bad is it? Is Jack going to be okay? Will Jack now be out of action for the rest of the tournament too? *Can* we replace another teammate this late? Even if we could, who *could* we tap next?

Was this just an accident? Somehow, I doubt it. One, we've seen a lot of cheating and sabotage in this tournament already even before this happened; and two, this is among the first turbo-duels we've ever seen that even *had* a pit crew. A good percentage of the turbo-duels we've witnessed not only had no pit crew, but were started on the run, with little if any prior preparation, in locations with plenty of trash or debris to get sucked into that air intake, and we would've seen this happening all over the place. That it's so rare that it only happened now, suggests to me that it was no accident. So, whodunnit? We know Team Unicorn cheats; do they also endanger their opponents? Was whoever did this planning for this little prank to be as dangerous as it turned out? It's possible that someone else is messing with Team 5D's to put them out of action, or even to frame Team Unicorn. Or it's even possible that multiple parties are orchestrating multiple shenanigans against us at once. One thing sure-- if someone's trying to get in Yusei's head and get him to drop them out of the tournament, threatening and injuring his friends is definitely how best to go about it.

How far over the line *is it* to injure another duelist these days, since the Fortune Cup when Akiza nearly got booed from the stadium for it? If Team Unicorn was behind the malfunction with Jack's runner, were all of them on board with that? So far we've seen them fairly united on the shady play, but it seems to me that Jean might just cross a line that Andre and Breo wouldn't, and that could split them right down the middle. So I ask-- did all three Unicorns collaborate on the sabotage of Jack's runner, if they did that, and are any of them having qualms yet?

So it seems that Jack's air intake being clogged caused it to explode when he lost and his runner started expelling steam to cool itself from the duel. Let's see, so if I had to guess, based on what we know so far, I'd say this is something like how it works. Duel runner engines, when conducting races or duels (normal freeway speeds or riding around town doesn't end with a big cloud of steam), are cooled or fueled (or both) by the heating of water or another coolant that produces nonhazardous steam. The heat from the engine warms the coolant (water or otherwise) and turns it into steam, and the engine itself keeps from overheating. However, this isn't the way it works in cars, and this alone would be a bad way to have it work, because you'd have all that vapor pressure building up in the runner and no place for it to go. We know, though, that the steam doesn't escape from the runner until the duel is over. It's possible, also, though, that the steam itself provides more power for the moving runner once it gets going, and by keeping the steam trapped and hot, the runner improves its mileage after it's warmed up. This would explain a reason for keeping the steam trapped inside the runner. The liquid component of a runner changing to steam would also lighten the load, thus causing the runner's speed to improve after a few rounds. The vaporization of coolant into steam over time may have been the original source of speed counters; the longer a duel progresses, the more coolant evaporates, and the higher rate of speed there is available. We also know that Jack's runner blew him sky-high when something got caught in his air intake and his runner tried to expel steam after the duel. If I had to guess, I'd say the steam flooding out of the runner vents-- and the supersaturated humidity and temperature gradient would've forced it outta there fast-- sharply decreased the air pressure inside the runner and created a vacuum without new air coming in through the malfunctioning intake valve, thus causing the air pressure outside the runner to cause an implosion. Ah, things you learn from learning about air pressure and humidity... I always find my classes apply to all this somehow...

Okay, so this is where I talk about the mechanics of the tournament itself. Before now, I'd been under the impression that we were going to have three-on-three duels. I get the sense, from their mention in Natural Instincts I, in which the two teams would've dueled that way if they had the time, that we will see three-on-threes at some point in the tournament, but not just yet. Right now, we've got one-on-ones between two three-person teams, so I'm going to write a whole bunch right here about what that's going to look like, how it might work, and perhaps what we're expecting later on.

This is the chart I made to map my current understanding of how this Prelim can play out:

Right now, what we know is that each time selected a lineup-- Team 5Ds' is Jack, then Akiza, then Yusei-- and didn't learn the other team's lineup until after they'd submitted theirs. From how Andre vs. Akiza is the next duel, I think the structure goes like this. The first duelist of each lineup competes in the first match, then whichever duelist loses, his team's second duelist competes next against the other duelist's first. Since Jack lost, his second teammate, Akiza, goes up next against Andre; therefore, if Akiza wins, she'll be up against Andre's second teammate, and if Andre wins, he'll duel against Yusei next.

Now, even if they hadn't had any idea of Team Unicorn's strategy, the lineup Team 5D's chose to start their first Prelim plays well to their strengths and weaknesses. Jack is the most aggressive, can be very scary and impressive, doesn't get even a little bit nervous in front of stadium crowds, and if the other team's starting off shaky (and how many other duelists in this thing have the pro circuit experience Jack does-- hey, you don't suppose Hunter Pace has a team...?), Jack certainly won't be, and his early aggression could be a knockout punch for an unsuspecting rival team and set the tone for subsequent rounds.
Yusei, on the other hand, is steady and versatile, and is great at making the best out of a bad situation; if the enemy team gets past his teammates early, Yusei is probably Team 5Ds' best shot out of their three duelists to pull out a come-from-behind. Since Yusei is Team 5Ds' last duelist, whenever he duels it will be for the win because if he goes down his team goes down with him, so the team's last slot is where you'll find their pinch-hitter. Moreover, the decision of whether or not to pull Jack over when they noticed something up with his runner was unquestionably Yusei's, but when Yusei's out there dueling, he'll be relying on the rest of everyone to come to a decision together; since Yusei is trusted to make decisions for the team, putting him last means he spends more time at the control booth and might even not see action at all. Because Yusei's strategy is the team's strategy, with him making decisions at the booth, that also means it's to the team's advantage to keep their hand hidden as a team and keep him off the field until as late as possible.
Akiza's role in the middle slot is a bit of an interesting one; the stakes get higher once the team has had one knockout already, and the first and last duelists in a team, in terms of likelihood, will have their decks geared toward the other team's first and last, because First vs. First is a certainty, and Last vs. Last is the result of everything but a fairly decisive rout up to that point. Therefore, Akiza's primary goal in this duel is to keep Andre from getting to Yusei-- because that would be a First vs. Third, a radical unlikelihood that Yusei's strategy as the third duelist won't be very well-prepared for. I'd say also it's smart to have a second duelist whose strategy is markedly different from your first duelist's, because whatever the first duelist's strategy was, it just got beat by the person who will next be dueling the second. In practice, it's strategically sound for Akiza to have a strategy that's nothing like Jack's, because that'll probably make it strong against Andre's if Andre's strategy was so demolishing against Jack's. Rock, Paper, Scissors. Sort of.

This is why I think Team Unicorn's lineup is going to end up being Andre first, Breo second, Jean third. Jean is the brains of the operation. If Team Unicorn's smart, they'll keep him off the field until the last and keep him in the booth calling the plays, and rely on his craftiness in a pinch. Plus, you just know it's going to come down to him versus Yusei, because Jean's been orchestrating all these questionable plays, which may or may not include this accident. Since Andre, like Jack, is the team's 'talker', so to speak, I'm not that surprised that he was leading them off. Therefore, my guess is that if Akiza beats Andre, she'll be up against Breo next, and if Andre beats her, his next fight is Yusei. First team to knock out all three of the other team wins. Reminds me a bit of heart points in Dungeon Dice Monsters; wonder if anyone's crazy enough to do *that* on runners these days, and if we'll ever know...?

This system is also reminding me of Back to Battle City -- most of the duels are to determine who faces who, and it was noted at the time that that could make them even more important than the high-stakes duels they determine. In that sense, Akiza's role as second duelist is very important; this duel makes the difference between Yusei vs. Andre-- which is a longshot win for the team at best-- and herself vs. Breo, which just determines what happens next.

Now before finishing this off, I wanted to ask why the tournament organizers decided to start off with two of the best-known teams, and why they put them in the same Prelim rather than drawing it out. I mean, this is sort of a Yugi-vs.-Weevil-in-Duelist Kingdom here, a match some spectator remarked that they hadn't expected to see until the playoffs because both were such big names. I think the tournament organizers may be a bit worried about hanging onto their audience's attention through all this. After all, this division alone will see, in theory, five rounds of knockout brackets just like this one, if our team must win twice to advance. Each other division, and there are eight, will also see five round, making a total of forty one-versus-one at a time knockout brackets like the one I just explained happening between Teams 5D's and Unicorn right now in the Prelims alone. This is going to take a while. They want to get people invested in this such that they want to see it play out, such that they follow when the next one is and get invested in their favorite teams' progress. Therefore, they started things off big to leave people wanting more.

Team Unicorn had been doing their homework on Yusei, Jack, and Crow for weeks, while Akiza has only been on the team for three days. Akiza's last-minute addition to the team may work to our advantage against Team Unicorn, because they haven't had much time to research her. She also has no professional turbo-duels on record because she's only been turbo-dueling a matter of weeks or months; it would be difficult for them to look up any record of Akiza's turbo-dueling technique at all. Akiza's the big question-mark in Team Unicorn's strategy against Team 5D's, and if there's a fatal flaw in their strategy, that's probably where it's most likely to be. Moreover, guess which tapes Team Unicorn could get their hands on easiest concerning Akiza's duel history-- gotta be the Fortune Cup, and she's a whole different person than she was then. I wonder what last-minute planning they've done, and if they'll find it not working due to poor information?

I wonder, though, if Team Unicorn knows that Akiza can kick their tailpipes without actually injuring them now? Are they counting on her going psychic and are they planning on it? I came up with a fairly off-the-wall theory-- if Team Unicorn was behind Jack's 'accident', was it for the purpose of scaring Akiza, an amateur and a female duelist ('Cause "everyone knows boys duel better than girls do; it's actually a scientific fact"-ep#36), out of dueling next so Andre isn't in any danger? When she stays in, are they going to start getting nervous?

Now that Andre has defeated Jack, Akiza's goal here, I predict, is to keep Andre from getting to Yusei. As the last player on their team, Yusei's deck is going to be geared toward Team Unicorn's second and third players, because it's highly unlikely that he ends up in a duel with Andre; only way it could happen is if Andre gets past both Jack and Akiza first, singlehandedly. If Akiza loses here, that's exactly the unlikelihood that we'll be up against, and we'll only be able to win if Yusei then pulls the same feat and beats all three of Team Unicorn's duelists singlehandedly. Akiza, as our second duelist, will make the difference between our next duel being elimination or longshot (Yusei vs. Andre) and it being the second lowest-stakes duel in the possible chart (Akiza vs. Breo, which will only determine whether the next duel will be Breo vs. Yusei or Akiza vs. Jean). The lowest stakes in the chart, in terms of anyone getting eliminated or ending up against a duelist they weren't ready for, was this match, Andre vs. Jack, because even the quickest outcome, one team completely routing the other, takes at least three rounds.

Akiza's first pro turbo-duel, and good chance of her first big crash; Jack and Crow are dropping like flies over here. *Is* she scared? How much does she suspect their opponents of sabotaging Jack, and will she have trouble keeping her temper? What I'm getting at here is, will her powers be a concern?

My next question is, I doubt Andre gets to switch out his deck (he may be allowed to use a side deck), so how does Andre's counter-power deck-- "The Deck"-- measure up against Akiza's deck, and how do they match up strategically in terms of what they have to work with?

It occurs to me that this next duel is going to be flowers versus unicorns. Pretty sure Akiza and Andre are about to show us just how serious that can be.

Last but not least, I want to see these guys go down. I'm looking forward to our team mopping the floor with them, so here's to Akiza's victory next round!

Well, our next episode is entitled "Trouble for Team 5D's". How... exciting. Does this mean Jack's crash is really bad? Well, 'til we find out, I'm signing off for now. G'night! Happy April Fool's Day (and sixth anniversary of the premiere of "Name of the Game"-- no joke!). -Clio

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