The Death of Raw Deal

About 7 years ago I walked into a hobby shop looking for some product and noticed something on the shelf...a new CCG (Collectible Card Game) based on professional wrestling. At the risk of losing any credibility I might have ever had...I have, from time to time, enjoyed watching the carnival entertainment of hucksters known as professional wrestling. Yes, it is cheesy, predictable, and...let's face it...downright stupid, but it is also fun. Well, I picked up a couple of decks, the Rock and Stone Cold.

Tried out a couple of games. It seemed fun. Introduced my brothers and some of our friends to it. Pretty soon we had as many as 13 people playing, and most of us built multiple decks. We even set up a league with Title Belts and stuff.

It was fun. We had pay-per-views, tag team matches, all sorts of things going on. At one point I had a Rock deck built that won 47 consecutive games in a 2 day period. Later we started going to tournaments when we learned about those.

We did really well at them. I won several, Kenneth, Phillip, and Kevin all won some, and even Eric won one. New expansions came out. The game got more complex. We played a lot...A LOT of games. Well into the thousands. Often enough, Sundays would be spent hanging out at Kenneth's with Kenneth, Phillip, Kevin, Eric and myself playing dozens of games every week. Sometimes one person would be hot and win most of their games, but more often we each won a few and lost a few. It was one of the best periods of my life. Loved it.

Well, new expansions changed things. I think the one that was the beginning of the end was the Divas Overload era. Prior to that, no matter what expansion came out, we had a variety of decks that could and did win. But the design of that set was poor...through using a combination of cards it became possible to build a deck that not only won virtually every game...it also shut the other person out to where they would never get a single card played successfully. This is called boring.

On the bright side, we still had a lot of fun at home playing a variety of decks...but we also knew they were not "top shelf" decks. I was the T.O. at that time so took goofy decks anyway...but the others wanted to play well at the tournaments. I typically would win all but one of my games at the tournament, then drop before the cut. That meant at most I had to see the vicious decks once in any given tournament. The boys, however, unless they were playing those same NPE decks (Negative Play Experience) would see those decks twice...in maybe 5, maybe 6 games. So sometimes you would have almost 50% of your games be no fun.

This was due to 2 things) 1, poor card design that created an imbalanced environment and 2) having certain players who insisted on bringing these decks and no others.

So while had a tournament that looked like this:
Me: I brought Buh-Buh Ray Dudley, a deck considered unplayable, based in on Heat and forgot 3 key cards so had a bad version of a weak deck, though I would argue, based on my results, it was a much better deck than people credited it for.
Ken: Playing Hall & Nash, a deck considered even MORE unplayable than Buh-Buh. He had tweaked it and done some fun stuff.
Kevin: Playing Rhyno, marginally more playable than the other 2...but trying to win with a card considered unplayable, the First Blood Match. And doing it occasionally.
Phillip: Playing RVD in a build that has no chance against the top tier superstars.
Eric: Playing Brock Lesnar in a hand-building version during a period when hand-destruction was the name of the game.
Why did we play them?
I thought it was a challenge to build a workable Buh-Buh. I came up with a variation I thought would A) Work and B) Surprise people because it violated every "sound" principle of deck building. And it worked very well, losing only one game in 4. Everyone who "knew" the game laughed at it...but it won a respectable amount.
Ken was a big Hall & Nash fan as wrestlers and wanted to play them even if they were terrible.
Kevin liked taking unplayable cards (and Busted Wide Open was second only to Tornado DDT in the coaster status)
Phillip was a huge RVD fan. He knew it could not win much against good decks, but he liked the character.
Eric just did not like building decks so played one he liked, even though he knew it would lose almost every game.
Meanwhile, people not of our group were playing:
James, BFM, a good but not great deck. He just was a HUGE Kane fan and played him exclusively.
Kelly: Hurricane. She was about 9, terrible at the game, but liked the Hurricane.
Casey: JBL: He brought either this deck or Mankind EVERY SINGLE WEEK. And lost 3 of 4 games. But he liked the concepts and never tweaked them. He just liked playing those decks.
Jo: She came to bring Casey and Kelly. She played the Highlight of the Night every week too because she liked him. Again, never changed her deck, you knew what you would see every week. She played him because she liked him.

So as you can see, the decks were for fun. We knew they weren't competitive. We did not care. It was fun to play these decks. But there came on the tournament scene a different breed of player.

Jake: who every week brought an NPE deck. Goldberg with Rules, Evolution plunge...he brought those decks exclusively. Worse, he would trash talk the entire time. Nobody wanted to play against him no matter what deck he brought and because of the ones he brought...I actually had people forfeit without playing him. They paid 5 bucks to forfeit because playing against him was no fun. Think about that. Fortunately, he only showed up a couple of times.
Cody: Goldberg, Evolution, maybe a 3 Minute Warning that stripped the opponent's hand and played solitaire until the game was over. He was almost as bad as Jake for trash talking. Nobody wanted to play against him.
Josh: Same as Cody except he was fun to play against. He would joke around and have a good time. But he was still playing solitaire.

So there were 2 or 3 people against whom you probably would not even get a card played. There were 9 of us playing for fun. Of the 9, Kenneth, Kevin and I could regularly compete with the 3 if we wanted (I actually had a winning record against every one of them. In fact, there were only one or 2 people ever I had a losing record against...one being Greg, a guy who moved here from Arizona during a time when I was deliberately playing goofy decks and won all but one or 2 games we ever played, and a local guy who never "got" our "build garbage decks and bring them around on Sunday" concept. We would be playing horrific decks that could barely reverse anything and he would play decks he cribbed from tournament winning reports. He never really understood that was no fun for anyone but him.) and Phillip, Eric and James were capable of the occasional win.

Well, that killed the fun of tournaments. We Starving Crazed Weasels had a choice: we could build decks that kept it fun for the Van Hoosers, Eric and Phillip...or we could compete with Josh and Cody and therefore become NPEs for the others.

We chose the first, but that became a bit of an NPE for us because we knew we COULD win tournaments...we would just rather build stuff we knew COULDN'T. So it made tournaments a chore instead of fun.

Meanwhile, the sets kept bringing up more ways to make it no fun for most people. We kept trying. Slowly, the Sunday games died away as we decided to compete with the Cody's and Joshes. And yes, Kenneth and Kevin each won a tournament, I retired from the TO duties and won a couple...but the Van Hoosers stopped coming, so did Eric, Phillip stopped playing, and none of us enjoyed them.

This was a problem around the Raw Deal world. Every set there was a deck archetype that kept anything else from even playing a card successfully. You were reduced to playing that deck or the one set up to beat it. No more playing a 4 Corners Hurricane or something goofy...every week I brought a beastly Batista or similar thing, Kenneth brought a vicious Triple H...it was no fun, it was just "Who can stick fortitude first then sit behind pain reversals".

Then Survivor Series was released. And on the surface, it seemed player friendly. However, they made it so you had to purchase three sets if you played certain decks, otherwise key cards you could never have. It was a public relations disaster that added to the poor design choices of the last few sets.

Cards became very overpowered.

They took a half-way measure, they started a new format. But they lied about it. People said, "You are starting a limited format." They said no. Then they told us the rules...it was a limited format. Had they been upfront and said, "We are introducing a limited format" nobody would have cared. They lied. So many of us, just on principle alone, never played a game of it.

And then...they broke the Revolution, a move which essentially re-started the game. And again, they lied and said it didn't. But it completely made the old cards irrelevant, changed the way stars were introduced and supported.

Most of the Weasels stopped buying right there and if they did, it was just a couple packs. We stopped playing.

And then came the announcement that the license has been lost and the game is dying.

It is too bad. It had a fantastic engine, great play, diverse possibilities. It just ran into design issues, a habit of dissembling about what was happening, alienated the player base, and then tried a restart that failed.

But we are picking it up again. With modifications. We don't allow Revolution cards. We limit reversals seriously to ensure everyone can get a card or 5 played. We play decks that are not powered up to the Nth degree. We made it fun again.

R.I.P Raw Deal. I would love to see it make a come back. It was fun while it lasted. And it died long before it needed to.



And then Revolution hit.