It should be a requirement to play in Nationals to recieve an invite. I'm going to go on record and say Paul is a moron if he doesn't play a National round with a ridiculous rating that would require him like 4-5ing to miss an invite. It wouldn't make any sense whatsoever.
I just don't get some people sometimes. Do people NOT want to win Nationals? Do they think Worlds is EASIER? I don't think I could ever bring myself to a 3-0 drop for even a Worlds invite. What if that is YOUR event? What if it's "the one"? You just threw it away. You have to be doing SOMETHING right if you're 3-0. Have some freaking confidence. Dropping just makes me sick. You're speaking for all of WA it seems JandPDS, and isn't your guy's thing "you play to win the game"? So much for that.
Play it out people, this is freaking ridiculous. It's a game.
I just wanted to get on here and say that I agree with this 100 percent. I was considering not playing Nationals if I was guaranteed an invite to Worlds, but Chad has convinced me otherwise. He's right in what he's saying. I would feel cheated if our World Champion didn't even play Nationals and chose to sit on a rating instead.
My decision to not play Nationals stemmed from a few factors. First of all, it sounded so easy to just sit out Nats and skip on over to Worlds with a guaranteed invite. Second, I wouldn't have to work on deckbuilding or playtesting, and given my busy schedule until Nationals, this seemed preferred. Last, my 2006 Nationals experience was extremely unfortunate. I had the worst opening hands all day long (no Supporter in my starting hand the entire day), I had to play a deciding game against my brother (out of how many hundreds of people), and I got blatantly donked twice. All of these factors made me feel that sitting out Nationals was the best option.
After talking to Chad, however, I began to think about that single word:
option. When I started playing this game, I never considered such
options when it came to participating in tournaments -- I simply played out of pure enjoyment of the game itself. Such "important" considerations seemed to me a joke at the time -- I couldn't be paid to drop out of a tournament, nor could I be convinced to sit out from one to satisfy some "larger goal." Just like Chad said, it's a game.
I started to think,
What if I ended up being our World Champion? Would people appreciate the fact that I sat out at Nationals? My answer to that imagined situation is that even
I wouldn't appreciate such a fact. How could I? To think that the "best" Pokemon TCG player in the world rose to that position by not playing is absurd at best. After thinking about some of the things Chad has said, I finally realized that I, as a fellow player who does in fact dream about possibly becoming a World Champion, should play Nationals. To not do so and get a trip to Worlds would be nothing more than the blatant abuse of a flawed system.
With all of that said, I too believe that anyone who expects an invite to Worlds should play Nationals. It is, after all, the biggest Pokemon event of the year. I can only hope that our 2008 World Championship participants will be in attendance.