Marcus Wheeler
7 hrs
So I don't normally do this but the treatment to the Australian Worlds Representative Bohdan Temnyk at YCS Sydney was not only unfair, but blatant bullying from Konami.
Now, you'd figure that not getting a feature isn't directly grounds for saying that they're out to get him, it's a feature match right? who cares whether or not you get one of those at an event. What this post will hope to recognize is the fact that theres ridiculous inconsistencies regarding why he didn't get a feature.
He represented Australia at the World Championship, alongside Declan Matthews and Matthew Casserio, obviously he didn't do as well as those two did but getting to the World Championship is no small feat. Throughout the event you have Matthew and Declan featured in some way, Declan with a player interview and Matthew with a feature during the swiss rounds of the event. If you want to use justification that these two both Topped the World Championship so theres more valid reasoning for their feature, you can also use that logic to figure that the round one feature was given to Yaowei Zhang because of his YCS Sydney win in 2016, these are all reasonable things to assume. Bohdan also accomplished many things in 2016, aside from qualifying from the World Championship he had competed at YCS Toronto in 2016 and won the event, being the first Australian player to win an international YCS event.
I'm sure most of you will say that this is also probably not a justifiable reason as to why he should get a feature but a very big trend at European events is to feature those high profile players, people like Joshua Schimdt, Eugen Heidt, Alpay Engin and more recently at Bochum, Billy Brake. Billy was using a conventional Metalfoes deck, for anyone keeping up to date with the game at the time you'd see that the only true outliers were Scout and Monolith in his deck and even then, those were used in Japan (Note: this does not detract from Billy's accomplishment, his deck and play were impeccable and he deserves everything this game gives him). While on stream the commentators praise the accomplishments of all of these players and made note to point out Billy's '3 wins' fairly frequently, arguably being the justification as to why he was streamed during swiss TWICE and TWICE in top cut, even including a 'dream match' of Joshua Schmidt vs Billy Brake during one of the later rounds in swiss. Bohdan played against a lot of very good players but during swiss there were some clear feature matches that should have been put on stream, Bohdan played against Ryan Levine, an American Duelist who made the trip to the event, both were undefeated towards the end of day 1 and the matchup was not even considered for the feature, I'm sure the reason that will be given for this is that it was a Metalfoes mirror but this match had a brilliant back story that not many other matches would have. Ryan and Bohdan both competed at YCS Toronto, Ryan was Bohdans Top 4 opponent and Ryan was looking to get his win back at this event, so not only was this a feature that the viewers missed out on, Ryan missed out on a feature against someone he wanted to redeem himself against. (Note: Ryan would not receive a feature match until the top 32). As well as the match above, during round 9, Bohdan played against the 2013 Oceanic Champion, Christopher Mattiske. If we look at the matchup deckwise we'd see ABC against Metalfoe, a matchup that on paper doesn't seem like a relatively fun game to watch, however the feature match for this round was ABC against Metalfoes anyway.
Thats two high profile matches with internationally renowned players that were rebuffed for almost identical features on the stream anyway.
Throughout the stream, the Twitch chat asks for Bohdan, Luke Withington chooses to not acknowledge any of this until the top 4, where he can no longer justify not putting Bohdan on stream because then he would have featured the other Top 4 Competitor, Li Lee twice. Being stuck between a rock and a hard place Luke realises he would get crucified by the chat by not featuring Bohdan and asks very tongue in cheek "Do you guys want to see Bohdan on stream?" knowing full well that the chat has been asking the entire day and if he doesn't it would become blatantly obvious that they were avoiding featuring him from the beginning.
I'm not going to go into the lack of player interview after his match win in top 4 or the bias commentary from Luke Withington during these matches (Note: this is arguable, you can see some bias that this man tends to have towards certain decks), you're able to see these on Twitch and Youtube. After the finals we're completely devoid of a mutual player interview, similar to that of other European YCS events such as Bochum where both Finalists are interviewed after the game, adding to the fire.
Bohdan may not be the nicest person, I'm sure none of the people in this game are, but what seems to be neglected every time is that Bohdan always shakes his opponents hand and says good game or good luck. At locals Bohdan helps as many people as he can, I've seen his messages folder on both of his account and this man has so many messages he can't even answer them all but whenever he's feeling up to it he will reply to most questions about decks or plays which is something a lot of other high calibre players do. It seems as if theres some perception of him by most of the relevant people in the organized play community that he's some kind of monster that would jump at any chance to be on camera so he could do something vile and disgusting, he does tend to speak his mind online whether it be on Facebook, forums or twitch chat but ignoring this in person he's a normal human being who just enjoys playing yugioh, you cannot use his satirical comments online to base an opinion of the type person he is in the real world.
This man already gets no credit because he lives in Australia and travels to international events to showcase what he can do but if you were watching the stream from round 1 until top 8 you'd almost think that he had not attended or scrubbed out early.