State of the Schwarz - EIS, Worlds, Banlists, and the Future
Welcome back to the Bushiroad show ladies, gentlemen, and others- today I want to switch gears from game-focused content to take a moment to reflect on, praise, and condemn some very interesting decisions made by our overlords at Bushiroad Southeast Asia, henceforth referred to in this article as BushiSEA. Since getting back from Japan, and honestly even before I left, there’s been a growing resentment both in myself and in my fellow players, and even though I know for a fact that no one at BushiSEA will ever read something like this, I feel it necessary to put pen-to-page on some of these issues. It’s not like I make much video content anymore, and I’m already on the “content blacklist” where the company would never directly work with me anyway, so what better format than this to highlight just a smattering of the sentiment that I’ve both held myself and heard from many other members of the community, at all levels. If you are someone who typically rolls their eyes at such commiseration, I invite you to give this article a chance- not all parts of this piece will be negative, and in fact I’ll be starting out with some legitimately great improvements BushiSEA has made for the world of western Weiss Schwarz. That being said, you all have to admit that they’ve made quite a few strides backward in rapid succession, and this will be digging into those decisions deeply. Without further adieu, let’s jump right into it, starting out with some positives.
OPEN 5 FORMAT
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This opens the door for shops to match the release events of other games, and gets players out for releases they otherwise wouldn’t care about. Let's cook up a little example that highlights just how great this can be for your local community. Even if you don’t care about Umamusume as a property, you could come to an UMA Open 5 event on release week at your shop, grab 5 packs, and build a little 30 card deck to play from your pulls. This exposes you to the unique mechanic of the set, inheritance- a mechanic you’ve never seen before. You don’t know anything about anime horse girls (which is pretty impressive of you to not at this point), but you find playing the set to be pretty enjoyable, and hey, some of these foils look great too. When you go back up to the counter for prizing at the end of the event, you spy a Trial Deck behind the counter, and find yourself buying not only one of those, but a few more boosters as well. This pipeline is tried and true- nearly every other TCG under the sun does this, namely Magic, a game that despite even more horrific missteps than BushiSEA over the past few years continues to attract new players. While we’re unlikely to see a move to the prerelease-type schedule other games follow in the west, this Open 5 format is a massive step in the right direction for stores, long-time players, and prospective new players alike. Massive fucking win BushiSEA, major props. Whoever on your team came up with this needs a promotion, and should probably be running an entire team by themselves.
UNCUT SHEETS
This is a great add to prizing- uncut sheets are unique, valuable (both as trophies for those who would keep them and financially to those who would sell them to collectors), and literally free for BushiSEA to distribute. Adds like this that cost next to nothing for them to do but entice people to travel and compete are always straight benefits, and honestly if I had any criticism here it would be that they should have been added in the season directly after Bandai started doing it. Another W for the books BushiSEA. Just a pat on the back for this one, but a pat nonetheless.
BEYBLADE X
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I have always abided by the age-old saying that “If it’s not going to be good, it should at least be funny.” Beyblade X as the next English Exclusive has the potential to be both, and that should be exciting. While many people undoubtedly rolled their eyes at this announcement, I think that an equally large group in our community was hyped as hell, at least judging from the general sentiment of those in Japan for Worlds as well as what I’ve seen online. There’s actually a surprising amount of crossover between card gamers and beybladers, and the name recognition of Beyblade is undoubtedly incredibly high. “Meme marketing” potential is also big here, as a box of Beyblade trading cards sitting on the shelf is sure to attract some curious eyes. However, “potential” is surely the key word here- while I can dream of Captain Tsubasa-esque soccer ball mechanics for a beyblade spinning around your stage, all I can pray for is that BushiSEA doesn’t fumble the bag with this one… which unfortunately brings me cleanly to my next point in this article, and where any of my praise for BushiSEA decidedly ends.
EMINENCE IN SHADOW
When Eminence was announced at Worlds last year, I could not praise BushiSEA enough. It was a sign to myself and others that maybe, just maybe, we were going to get new IPs that were relevant to current western anime-consuming tastes in a more timely fashion. It’d been a while since our last exclusive when it was announced, so we were sure that within 6 or so months, we’d be playing with an EN exclusive set based on a show that had actually aired within the past year. Weiss lives and dies by the recency and cultural significance of its IPs after all, so these were good signs. As reveal streams waxed and waned over that year, we were left over and over without so much as a release date, but finally got one by late mid-year, pinned for release the week before Worlds. While Eminence was no longer in the general anime consumer’s mindspace due to the usual seasonal-churn forgetfulness, hey, better late than never! A brand new giant question mark releasing right before Worlds is also kind of exciting in and of itself, even if a bit unsettling and annoying for those preparing. And then, we started to get some card reveals-
Nothing was too offensive or crazy from the first batch, as well as the second “batch” that was “leaked” by doing a little right-click, inspect-element-fu. Cards seemed to be generic standard profiles or have potential, some with enough going on to warrant discussion about how they might fit into the meta. But as reveals continued to come out, much of them through nonstandard means since BushiSEA in their infinite wisdom largely refused to utilize the “Card of the Day” spoiler structure that Japan uses this time, things started to get a bit more concerning. Cards appeared underspec, or were shackled by seemingly needless conditions. But hey, surely we’ll get the “glue” when we get the full cardlist right? Those cards that bring the set together, the modern utility present in its immediate contemporaries like Oshi no Ko vol.2, the set releasing immediately before Eminence, and Umamusume, the next full set releasing immediately after (which is technically 2-3 years old by this point). Intern-kun even assured us, even if not explicitly, that EIS would be strong enough to curb the playrate of Overlord, even after it was largely buffed by the restriction list change.
The disappointment we all experienced when the full card list was released a month later was immeasurable, and all of our collective days were all ruined. EIS is woefully underpowered in a myriad of ways compared to releases even from the past few years, and pales in comparison to its two aforementioned contemporaries. Sitting across the table from OSK while playing any variant of the set was not only miserable, but also greatly highlighted massive design issues, with one in particular being glaringly apparent. If you’re one to brush me off when I say something like this, as I’m a very competitively minded player, I would invite you re-read through the card list- look for how many cards between levels 0 and 1 that have the cost text “Discard 1 card from your hand to the waiting room”; the set is drastically hard up for handfilter for no discernable reason. God forbid a Riko or Helmet, but the set doesn’t even have a traditional ditch-CX salvage profile, and the few other generalized options it does have are either stock-costed or restricted in some way that makes them undesirable. Watching your OSK opponent freely discard any card in their hand into a playable from their waiting room, something that pretty much all relatively modern sets and even other EN exclusives can freely do, was enough to make even the most resilient players green with envy. This disparity in modernity is so unmeasurably stark that I cannot be convinced that the set was reasonably playtested in any way, let alone intelligently designed to be relevant to Weiss’ current meta environment. If you compare the disparity in power for when they were released, Eminence is just as off-spec now as Batman Ninja was back when it came out.
Combos are woefully underspec across the board, all the advantage engines are either needlessly riddled with restrictions and conditions that even similar cards from a few years ago don’t have, or just don’t cut the mustard when lined up against other releases. Standby specifically got done dirty- the two RR 2/2s are some of the most egregiously underpowered and terrible cards I have ever had the misfortune of playing with. Nothing in the set seems to come together because the “glue” is missing- there are some interesting things you could try to put together, but every concept is only half-boiled and falls apart even in the brewing stage. For proof of that, just look at how many cards randomly get markers, and then go try to find what the payoff is for any of those cards gaining markers. And believe me, we really did try to cook- we had many extremely strong players, all names you know, desperately trying to figure out something that might be worth bringing to Worlds. Surely there was something hiding, some kind of “Sokka situation” hiding in the shadows (heh), and even with something there with the green 1/1 and some marker backrow free brainstorm shenanigans, none of it was anywhere close to enough. And you don’t have to take our word for it, because do you know how many Eminence representatives there were at Worlds? Zero. Not a single fucking one. There was more No Game No Life representation at Worlds than there was for the most recently released brand-spanking new English Exclusive. Just let that one sink in for a minute. If you would like a more in depth crash-out about the woefully terrible state of Eminence’s card pool, you can skip around in this stream archive of our set review for discrete examples of the kinds of things I’m referring to.
Moving on from card strength, another major issue I have with the set as an actual fan of Eminence as an IP is that they completely missed the mark on capturing the essence of it. Sure, there’s some cards that do feel flavorful, but it’s with the understanding of someone who watched a few clips or Instagram reels, then filled in the gaps with some wiki pages. BushiSEA has proven with their previous EN Exclusives that they’re more than capable of making things flavorful, fun, and iconic- Guilty Gear, RWBY, and hell, even MOB are all great examples of this, and Eminence is nowhere near them. Most of the cards feel extremely vanilla both to read and play, and even the distribution of cards for characters is way off. Why do the villains have so many cards, and why are the villains chosen so stupid? There’s no reason these throwaway characters that have maybe a combined 8-9 minutes of screentime across the entire first season should have a full third of the set dedicated to them. Why do the two fucking friend characters have not one, but two useless bond packages? Why are there so many literal vanilla cards in the set? Why is the penultimate Shadow finisher that’s supposed to capture the biggest moment of the first season a fucking common? Why is the whole set ordered fucking backwards for no reason? Who in the ever living fuck made this set and why do they seem to hate the thing they made? There were so many easy quick wins BushiSEA could have done to hit these “flavor and feel goals” that have nothing to do with card power- hell, I’ll do one right now off the top of my dome. Why isn’t there a set of Joker-style changers for Shadow/Cid? That’s easy flavor and function all in one, and there’s already a bunch of fucking useless marker garbage in the set! These kinds of things really aren’t hard, and again, they’ve proven they can do them in EN Exclusives before. There’s no real excuse you can make for Eminence feeling so milquetoast other than pure apathy, incompetence, or both.
As a purely competitive player, I don’t care much about foils, but I know they’re extremely important and I’d be remiss if I didn’t echo the gripes I’ve heard from others. Eminence unfortunately fumbled the bag here too- while the commissioned art with the Seven Shadows holding Weiss cards a la Kaguya-sama are nice, I don’t think they make up for the general bungling of the rest of the set’s high rarity cards. The SEC+ is hilariously terrible looking, having that garbage show up in my Card of the Day feed alongside Touhou reveals gave me a hearty laugh. SSPs (which are supposed to be higher-rarity and more desirable than usual SPs, mind you) are completely lacking in signatures and look cartoonishly awful. The AGR, oh wait, I mean SIR, isn’t even hand-signed. Having seen both the SIR and many AGRs (arigatou Box-sama) in my day, I can assure that no matter how much the card is financially worth, it pales in comparison to how special the real AGRs are to behold. If you want an example of what good foils can look like, go look at Weiss Schwarz China Exclusives over on Keeluah’s site. Some of those cards, specifically the new Fate ones, are gorgeous. I’m not quite sure why Chinese Exclusives, which are released into a smaller market, are better looking and have more effort put into them than our English Exclusives. The one thing I think they did right here with the foils is the existence of the “god pack”, a single pack containing all the Seven Shadows signs. That’s a legitimately cool thing to exist that… wasn’t advertised at all. No buzz, no advertisement, no fanfare- just word of mouth through socials that it even existed, with most who saw it thinking that it was just a hoax from mass box openers. Hey, maybe advertising that god pack would have been a great alternative for pushing sales of sealed products compared to what they did do, which was far more infuriating to far more people.
Eminence has 8 boxtopper promos, one for Shadow, then one for each of the seven girls. Conceptually, this is pretty neat and kind of flavorful. In practice, this is fucking stupid. So stupid in fact, that I would put it on the level of insulting. Instead of making these promos alt-arts or reprints of existing set cards, they are all unique utility profiles, many of them highly playable. There is nothing more miserable as someone who is trying to build a deck in a new set than running into an issue where they need to track down sometimes multiple copies of an extremely low population card, where the single price due to that low population is unbelievably high. Even worse, this forces the player to buy additional sealed product they do not need for a chance of acquiring multiple copies of one of these 8 cards. Furthermore, because there are eight unique cards, when you open a case (which is $900+ USD by the way), you only get 3 of each. This is not just ridiculous, this is insulting. Bushiroad Japan doesn’t do this shit anymore, we just get nice little bonus first/second cards and we get our promo support in easily available tournament support packs. There was no reason to regress into $40 Cowgirl PR world, but hey, BushiSEA decided to fucking do it anyway. Oh but don’t worry, this all gets worse the more you look into it! These utility cards are far more “playable” than those present in the actual booster, like someone far more capable and mindful came in to check the designer’s work, saw that the set was missing a bunch of things, and instead of telling the designer to go back to the drawing board, just slapped a boxtopper band-aid on it and shipped it. I have seen the Beta PR go for $20 or more on the singles market, likely because the booster itself does not have a climax swap that hits the waiting room. If BushiSEA wanted to do the conceptually cool thing, they could have just made sign-less, unfoiled PR reprints of all the Seven Shadows and Shadow with the art they’d already commissioned, and made those the boxtoppers. Everybody would have won in that case- people buying sealed product got a cool bonus, there’s no cringe as fuck unique promos to track down, and BushiSEA gets a nice sales bump. Instead, only BushiSEA profits from people having to needlessly open more boxes just to get some playable cards.
I could rant much longer about how upset I am with Eminence but I have already gone on quite long here, and I can feel my keyboard starting to heat up, so I will end it with one last statement. Eminence should make you angry, because the product is legitimately insulting to you as a consumer. The level of apathy and incompetence present here was only matched once in the history of English Exclusives with Batman Ninja, and while at least Eminence is indeed an anime, that doesn’t make it any less disrespectful and bungled as a product. You can, and should, demand better from your TCG company. BushiSEA has delivered far better products before, and we can at the very least let them loudly know that this level of “phoned-in” isn’t acceptable.
WORLDS JUDGING
Speaking of “phoned-in”, this one will be a quick anecdote from my experience at Worlds. Most of it was as expected, but one thing I have been unable to shake. When I was told to play on-stream, the judge sitting next to me, who from everything I can gather was a Bushiroad employee, was regularly perplexed by gamestates created by a fairly standard Door/Bar Overlord list. They had to ask, multiple times, why a character fronting into a 3/2 Ainz was not reversed, so much so that both myself and my opponent started to get slightly annoyed with them. You can actually see this in the recorded footage, where both myself and my opponent regularly turn to the judge to explain this, among a few other smaller incorrect attempted “gamestate corrections” by the judge. Normally, I would brush this kind of stuff off. I know the BushiSEA staff doesn’t know Weiss well, and the community has known that they “really only care about Vanguard” for years now, but this is literally Worlds. I am on stream, playing in the highest level of the game possible barring Top Cut of this same tournament, and the judge hawkeying my entire game, who’s paid job ostensibly is to maintain proper gamestate, not understand a fundamental part of how Overlord works.
Would it really be that hard to, oh I don’t know, just invite some of your very capable judges from NA and EU to come in to handle this if you don’t want to? Or just like, learn literally anything about what you’re literally paid to be doing? If I pulled a stunt like this in my career, I’d be fired, or at the very least reprimanded. Why is the bare standard minimum for a position as important as this not being met? I know for a fact that Ramil and other staff care deeply, but why are easy things like judging falling by the wayside, of all things. The deck and cards that this judge somehow doesn’t know about were quite literally just banned and restricted, again, which brings me to my next point-
THE BANLIST(S)
Before Worlds and funnily on April 1st, BushiSEA decided that they were going to update the banned and restricted list in accordance with data they’d collected from the BCS season. I don’t really agree with making bans and changes before Worlds, since people qualify in one meta and then must compete in a wholly different one for no real reason, but they’ve been doing this for years now. Both myself and others are kind of numb to it at this point, and most of it was fine or inoffensive. BD took the expected hit to the chin, HOL 8SB got restricted again for some reason (lol), and we got a long-awaited fix to the ban on SAO’s 2/1 Alice. The stranger “hit” was an update to the restrictions to Overlord- the 1/1 assist was limited to 1… but removed from the choice list. This meant you could play your choice of 1/0 Shalltear, colloquially referred to as “Bride”, or 2/1 Yuri, effectively giving the option to play one of these powerful cards back to Overlord pilots. This was quickly identified as a buff, not a nerf, and Overlord took a much higher position into Worlds than it had even been expecting previously. After Eminence turned out to be hot garbage, even I myself pivoted to OVL despite my lack of experience on the deck, and had a hell of a good showing, ending at 4-2, 12th place, one tiebreaker away from making top cut. I can assure you, even with my limited experience, the deck was buffed. I was so impressed by the strength of the list, that I had preliminarily decided to play OVL going into the Summerfest season. The deck had just been “restricted” again, BushiSEA had always done bans within a reasonable block of time, so at the very least I would have the trios format to play the list to my heart’s content. I was so enthusiastic about getting to play the deck, that I pre-ordered a playset of the new Extra Booster that is releasing at the end of this month.
On May 8th, in my jetlagged morning grog, I picked up my phone to see that BushiSEA had updated the restriction list again, this time only targeting Overlord. This time, it was not a buff- it was a fucking massacre. The 1/1 assist was still limited to one, but the 2C1 list was now expanded to 5C1 and encompassed not only the 3/2 Ainz himself, but the Mare Fumio and 2/1 tap counter alongside Bride and Yuri. The reasoning for the blistering, previously unheard of ~1 month turnaround between restriction updates was the following:
Despite commanding 13% of the meta at the Bushiroad Championship Series 25/26 World Finals event, Ainz Ooal Gown ultimately failed in his conquest, falling short of top 8. However, with the upcoming release of Extra Booster Nazarick: Tomb of the Undead Vol.3, we have decided to update the restriction list once more. With the updated choice restrictions, players lose access to all of Ainz Ooal Gown’s advisors, further limiting his reign as we head into the Bushiroad Summer Fest 2026 season.
I’m really not sure which of the points I’m writing about here is more insulting, Eminence or this. Both are pretty fucking bad. One is insulting to me as a general consumer, but this is insulting to me as a competitor and player. Updating the restriction list so quickly, with no warning or data as precedent (by their own admission!), with the only real reason given reading between the lines that “Extra Booster would make the deck too strong”, is one of the most disrespectful things I have seen a TCG company do with a banlist. Hell, even Konami has more respect for its players- this Overlord restriction is on the level of a Konami emergency ban, but with none of the supporting data or sentiment. To go even further, it reads like a massive “fuck you” to everyone who purchased the new Extra Booster, and I’m not just talking about those intending to play Door/Bar Ainz. What BushiSEA should have done was just ban the 1/1, like Japan did years ago now, because that is the card that is obviously the problem, but instead they “cooked” up this boneheaded alternative.
By creating a massive 5C1 list, they’ve effectively shot every alternative OVL deck, present, past, and future in the crossfire. The new incoming 8 Door build that’s primarily built from Extra Booster cards is wounded before it even releases. You can’t play Mare Fumio (which is a climax combo too, easy to forget) in any deck with Yuri. Why? Because of the “crimes” of a completely unrelated deck. The shortsightedness and lack of care put into an update like this is laughable at best and infuriating at worst. I don’t know why they decided to make such a stupid update, and I don’t even care that they banned the deck I was excited to play. Hell, I want 3/2 Ainz deleted from existence. The deck is fucking toxic, and has been since release. It completely removes certain strategies from the metagame and makes casual players want to unalive themselves rather than come to locals. It never should have existed as long as it did. And had I woken up, jetlagged and sick, on that May 8th morning and seen “1/1 assist is banned”, I wouldn’t even be putting a point about this in my article. That would have been deserved, and correct. I wouldn’t be angry about the money I spent on Extra Booster, I’d be happily playing around with 8 Door or something instead, with Yuri and tap counter and Mare Fumio and maybe even Bride in my deck, as they should be allowed to be. Please, BushiSEA, I am begging you- just think for five seconds about the implications of what you do with these banlists. You say you test, you deflect to not having the skill or insight of top level players, but the decisions you make just fly in the face of everything you claim.
If you want people to stop calling you a clown show, you need to stop running a fucking circus.
TRIOS WORLDS INVITES
After the Worlds announcement stream wrapped, socials were buzzing about one thing found on the Summerfest prizing pages in particular: Trios champions were now going to receive unpaid invites to BCS Worlds. Both myself and others welcomed this change- Worlds being a relatively small tournament (<64 players) has never been a good look for the game, as even though players have to qualify to be invited, not all regions are created equal. And no, I’m not talking about NA vs. EU here- I’m talking about shit like Jakarta and previously events like Costa Rica. By increasing the size of worlds, we could at least push the tournament to require more stamina to participate in, adding a Swiss round and maybe one Top round, from 8 to 16, which would more closely follow the general size of tournaments held in NA, EU, and AUS, where players are expected to 6-1 7 rounds of Swiss, then win at least 3 straight rounds of top cut just for a chance of making an unpaid invite. Overall, the reception to these trios invites was positive and most players were excited for a more competitive summer season now that something was on the line. I even saw people who had never gone to trios events make definite plans to travel to Summerfests because of this impending change.
Flash forward a few days later, and the blurb calling out the trios unpaid invites was snatched away from the Summerfest prizing page. Some are saying that it was simply a mistake, and that the reward was reserved only for Singapore Cardfest, or something like that. Personally, I really don’t care if it was a mistake or not- it should be reinstated. Providing this for only SG, a region that already cares very little for EN Weiss, is yet another insult. And before you swoop in to ask me how I know, I was literally there a few years ago. I met their local scene, I played with their players, and they’re good people who are also pretty good at Weiss Schwarz… but they also only really care about JP format. This makes sense if you think about it: they’re closer to it, cards are more easily available, they like that there’s more sets, and many other reasons that anyone would prefer one format to another, but the point still stands. They don’t really care much for EN. So why, in the everliving fuck, is the region that does not care much for the format and has woefully lower numbers than NA, EU, and AUS, receiving preferential treatment. Because BushiSEA is based in Singapore of course! I can’t bring myself to think of any other reason. We already saw them dump a ton of money into Marvel Demo Caravans and a bunch of EN sets that you can’t play outside of Southeast Asia for some godforsaken reason, but hey, maybe there’s another reason that’s more legitimate. Not like we’d ever know, they don’t exactly provide any transparency outside of what little drip-feed we get out of Intern-kun.
I honestly hope this point here is unfounded, and they restore the trios unpaid invites. It’s such a small thing that would go a long way, and if they’re going to do it for Vanguard or whatever, they already need to acquire a larger Worlds venue to facilitate that anyway. Maybe instead of spending resources on a dinner day that no one particularly cares for or about, they could run the tournament for two days instead, so that they could accommodate a larger Worlds tournament with more attendees. It’s not like they’re paying for more flights! The invites were always supposed to be unpaid! But hey, what do I know, I only acquired venues and ran tournaments that were 5-6 times the size as worlds on a regular basis during my time TOing for Melee, that arguably required more equipment to put on, but you know, I’m sure the giant company with far more resources than little idiot broke-ass me in college is really just doing “all they can”.
TOWARDS THE FUTURE
Weiss is on a precipice of what might be our greatest modern renaissance- the release of Weiss Schwarz Online. Every other TCG that’s received a digital client, no matter how broken or dysfunctional they are, has seen major upticks in growth, and I don’t think we should expect our outcome to be much different. We’ll see a proportionally smaller boom in size, sure, but a boom is coming nonetheless. Bushiroad Japan knows this, and they’re cranking up the heat. Look at those Touhou reveals, the demo deck they put out alone, and tell me that they aren’t cooking as hard as they damn well can. By comparison, BushiSEA took like, 1 or 2 good steps forward, and then triggered a landslide all the way back to way before where they started. It’s a bad time for the game to look bad in the west. Not that there's really a “good time” for it, but come on, could we have at least “locked in” up until WSO dropped? I don’t know how it is in the rest of the world of western Weiss, but after the BushiNavi problems got ironed out, NA regionals have been in a pretty good spot, and I attribute a lot of that to the efforts of Ramil and staff that I’ve met at those events. I know those people care, and I know their hands are tied a lot of the time, but I’m worried that even with how well NA regionals are running that they can’t survive a WSO-juiced influx in player count if they aren’t getting the support they need from BushiSEA. If Intern-kun is on Twitter complaining about things outside of their control at BushiSEA, I can only imagine how hamstrung and red-taped BushiNA over in California is.
It should be obvious by the tone of this article that I’m angry. I’m frustrated. I’m beaten down and upset. But it’s because I love this game. I love the community. I love you, and I want you to have the best time that you can have playing English Weiss Schwarz no matter where on Earth you play it. We deserve better than what BushiSEA is providing for us, and you are allowed to demand better from them. Hell, you should demand better from them. Praise them when they do well, like the Open 5 format, and absolutely publicly slam them when they mess up, like the rest of this garbage I’ve talked about in this article. If we want them to shape up, then we can’t keep letting them slide backwards.
See ya’ll at locals 😘
- Carmen
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