New Japan Pro Wrestling is Returning and That Makes Me So Happy, Let Me Count the Ways

I will not deny I am an unabashed New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW) mark. Pro wrestling, back when I was in high school and college, was one of my five essential food groups alongside comic books, video games, Magic: The Gathering, and actual food/beer. But because of a multitude of life-factors ranging from graduating college and moving, starting a career, the whole "ECW and WCW folded so the main producer of wrestling product became so generic and up-its-own ass due to lack of competition" caused me lose my interest in big beefy men in little pants just smacking each other silly. For nearly a decade and a half I became a lapsed fan of pro wrestling until 2017 came around and the little thing called the NJPW app on Fire Stick became reality and I injected the extra addictive strain of heroin known as "the Kenny Omega/Kazuchika Okada feud" into my veins for the very first time. Since then I have been as rabid a fan of beefy dudes in tights as I have ever been, until COVID-19 hit and pro wrestling became but a foot note of a facet in life that drastically changed for all of us.


While most of the main wrestling productions in the US - most notably AEW and WWE - adapted to a new brand of production in order to keep eyes on their brand of entertainment. These companies moved to a model of recording their shows in empty, crowd-less arenas to at least keep their product - their wrestlers - in action and in the eyes of the fanbase. Also, y'know, to keep the money coming in because they have TV deals to honor and advertisers to keep satiated. So for almost three months now a lot of pro wrestling has continued in some form - a lot quieter at the least - but not NJPW, who decided that they cared about the safety of their performers and production crews a great deal more than they did putting on shows to empty air and has remained fallow during COVID quarantine. And I'm not condemning the other companies for staying on air, in fact AEW and WWE sub-brand NXT have been valuable tools of the "keeping me from slamming my head against a wall until it turns into a fine paste" variety while the world has been on fire outside. But, regardless, the IMO best wrestling product in the world has stayed quiet while that world wrestled with the staggering consequences of the virus and they were sorely missed. But, as announce this past week, NJPW is returning soon, starting off like the productions that stayed open did and going empty arena at first, but regardless, we are seeing the triumphant return of what also returned my passion for the "squared-circle" and, needless to say, I am fucking hyped and here is why.

First off, the swath of NJPW tournaments, like the upcoming New Japan Cup.


The main reason I love NJPW is, quiet frankly, they let the in-ring action do most of the heavy lifting. There's two main reasons, I believe, to enjoy pro wrestling and that's the athleticism of its superstars in the ring and the antics, skits, promos, etc of them outside it or in between bouts. Why I love NJPW so much is that, as a company and product, they emphasize the former to push their brand or wrestling so much so that the exhibitions in the ring also form the bulk of their storylines as well, not leaning as much on interviews, taped segments, et al like other productions. To which NJPW runs a lot of tournaments as a means to both heavily showcase the physical skills of their wrestlers and to inform the major rivalries and build heat between the talent. These tournaments, specifically the annual G1 tournament that declares the number one contender for the heavyweight championship every January at NJPW's biggest show, Wrestle Kingdom, are just far and away the best productions of in-ring action on the planet when they come. The talent involved always goes next level on the matches in these bracketed events because they know they are the showcase for themselves and the brand they represent. The prestige of the tournaments is elevated by the wrestlers taking each other to the limit and that prestige highlights their efforts. The wrestlers know that their performances represent and elevate the whole and in turn elevates themselves, especially when they get pegged to actually win one of the tourneys and eventually get themselves a title shot at a bigger card, most likely against this man

Kazuchika Okada 

While not currently the top man in NJPW (after losing the main title belt to Tetsuya Naito at this year's Wrestle Kingdom), the "Rainmaker" of NJPW has basically been the top performer in pro wrestling for years now. The man is just the absolute epitome of what makes a top notch wrestler, which is why he is defining this generation. He oozes charisma but has a lot of humility behind his flamboyant garb. He's a premier athlete with a rock solid repertoire and routinely elevates talents who may not be on par with his in ring performance and rises to the challenge of the rare peer of his who has superior in-ring talents. There is a reason that the aforementioned Okada/Omega rivalry pulled me back into pro wrestling like Wile E. Coyote always get whiplashed back whenever he buys a dumbshit giant slingshot or whatever in his quest to bang/eat the Roadrunner. They are just two supreme, generational talents that put everything on the line against each other four times to elevate themselves by elevating the brand by putting on exhibitions of athleticism, in-ring drama and storytelling, and just in general showing how joyous pro wrestling can be when everything is being done with next-level dedication and effort. Okada is the embodiment of that effort and it is absolutely shocking how effortless he actually makes it look, which is why he has been the standard-bearer for NJPW, and pretty much the pro wrestling industry, for near a decade now with plenty more to come.

Speaking of "more to come," let's talk everyone's favorite Murder Grandpa, Minoru Suzuki.

It took me almost four decades on this planet to finally aspire to be a person, and that person is soon-to-be 52-year old Minoru Suzuki, who spends ever second he gets on camera beating up developmental talent, taking and delivering the stiffest forearm shots in the business and laughing all the while, and taking every possible opportunity he can to jam opponents heads into the mat via the spikiest of piledrivers, the Gotch, or just trying to put some dumb bastard to sleep with a rear naked choke. He's a wonderfully sadistic bastard whose destructive tendencies in-ring are only matched by his love of Hello Kitty outside the ring, and I wish he were my dad. It's a shame that the faction he leads, Suzuki-Gun, is now so boring it almost completely buries him on screen, but the fact that he remains so dynamic he drags a handful of mid-carders to his level at his age is astounding. But, hey, speaking of factions!

Bullet Club


The ever-evolving, most beloved fan favorite faction in all of wrestling today, I absolutely miss the antics of these arrogant and vicious bastards. Even if they have lost the sheen of the "Elite" assemblage the team that hooked me back into wrestling with the departure of Kenny Omega, the Young Bucks, Cody Rhodes, Marty Scurll and Hangman Page to go start AEW (well, except for good old Marty), Bullet Club is still just the cool kids club. Toma Tonga and Tanga Loa, the Guerrillas of Destiny, are still just the two most swagger packed dudes on the planet, almost single-handedly carrying a tag team division in NJPW that, let's be honest, is one of the few glaring weak spots of the company. New faction leader, "Switchblade" Jay White, has developed spectacularly from weird knife fetishist, wanna be goth to just one of the most engaging heels in all of the business. His work rate is shockingly top notch for someone so young but he has just excelled at becoming an over-exaggerating, shitbag heel that you can just tell he's priming up to lead a company at some point in the near future of his career. Add to the mix the presence of one of the most innovative wrestlers of the past twenty years in KENTA and the always endearing antics of BC stalwarts Yujiro Takahashi, Chase Owens, and "The General" Bad Luck Fale, oh and top goddamn notch work rate in new additions El Phantasmo and Taiji Ishimori, and you have the most watchable group in all of pro wrestling still killing it nearing a decade after their formation.

And there's just so much more I'm so absolutely jazzed to see light up the ring again. NJPW Heavyweight Champ Tetsuya Naito, a being comprised of pure, unadulterated charisma that he dares everyone to hate him every time he walks to the ring, a challenge on one can accept. His Los Ingobernables faction is probably second only to the Bullet Club in enjoyability, and maybe second to no one in all of wrestling when it comes to pure in-ring talent.

There's also the Super Jrs!!! Whiiiiiich we're not going to get this year, sadly, because of the Corona, but still. New Japan is pretty much the home for high flying these days with a slew of names that may not have wide recognizability, but when you mention them to the most dedicated of fans of in-ring performances and athletic feats, you know how good they are by how bright these markiest of marks' eyes light up. A while he's going to be moving on from Super Jr. action to more main event affairs, I really, really want to see what is in store for the evolution of Will Ospreay, who has been as responsible for just as many of the highest rated matches of the past few years as the biggest of names like Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada, to the point that many - including myself - would argue he's pretty much third to only those names for work status in the business, if not even or actually ahead of them. His nexts few steps may be the most interesting thing going in ALL of pro wrestling because they may be preceding him leaping - which his usual triple spin flip flare - into main event and top billing status.

There's Kota Ibushi who may be the most innovative worker in the business and with a neck made of adamantium.

There's the "Stone Pitbull" Ishii, whose is hands down the biggest fucking workhorse (workdog?) and most under-appreciated man in the business. All the man does is be tough as nails cast in the same adamantium as Ibushi's neck and put on the kind of 4-and-a-half star bangers that epitomize the content of those NJPW tournaments that I absolutely adore. There is no other person whose in-ring performances and focus on being tough and oozing "fighting spirit" exemplify what NJPW is all about.

There's "the Ace" Hiroshi Tanahashi, whose ridiculous middle-aged air guitaring still always makes me smile and whose physique makes men half his forty-three years weep of inadequacy, and can still go as good as anyone (provided his knee is supplemented with the right amount of glue and duct tape).

Oh, and sometimes Jon Moxley and Chris Jericho show up there! So some of the best things about the other companies recognize the best in the game and can't help but have a taste.

And there's Daryl, who is just so Daryl


There's just so much, SO MUCH!, more I can't wait to see return to that ring half a world away from me. I'm glad they played it safe and I'm glad they prioritized the safety of their people over revenue streams but the world pro wrestling has been dimmed operating without this product by about as much as NJPW overshadows the rest of the business when it is running full steam. If I had budget to properly encapsulate my markdown for the talent in this industry, I'd own shirts a good twenty wrestlers deep and twice per. I want my Rainmaker, I want my Bullet Club, and I want my G1 tournament. I want to see the "Sport of Kings" in all its idealized (and sometimes borderline slapstick) glory and I want to be ecstatic to stay up until 6am Eastern Standard Time just to absorb it into my dried out and crusty eyeballs. And I want like seven thousand Ishii vs. Shingo Takagi matches as the rest of the year plays out, because the best therapy for this shithole year we call 2020 is obviously two beefy masochists just looking to out beef slap each other for twenty minutes at a time for our enjoyment. All hail the triumphant return of the King of Sports.

The Natives Are Getting Reprint Restless

Another week, another (arguably justifiable) uproar in the world of Magic: The Gathering (MTG). Honestly, I cannot even tell anymore if this is a case of things reached a tipping point and, since us nerds have notoriously terrible balance, fell over at the same time, or if player ire has been balancing on the edge for a while now and just finally got that nudge. I'm leaning the latter if you lean back a little and take a look at the overall picture of the game right now. I touched on this a couple weeks ago, but between the velocity of MTG product that has been pushed out on the fanbase recently, then you couple that with a significant chunk of that new product rending asunder formats left and right with their power level and then forcing banning, the state of the game has not been the best and left players frazzled. So, as I talk myself into this, it would stand to reason that the last shove over the edge would come in the form of Wizards of the Coast generating even more ire at the direction they have for their typically beloved game by announcing a reprint product that promises to throw a bunch of juicy, sought-after cards into the pool, but at an extremely premium price.


The price of cards has always been a weird subject in this game for years now, and even going back the twenty-some years when I originally summoned my first Lhurgoyf and officially joined the demonic cult known as Magic: The Gathering. The cost of the game has risen exponentially since back in that era, but even then a deck full of staples - like Gaea's Cradles and Natural Orders for my trusty Wakefield Green deck - would still cost you twenty bucks a pop. That seems paltry compared to day's astronomical price points when you look at the broad swath of cardboard spells, but it was such a new concept back then that you could be enjoying a game where the piece had value like that, it was actually kind of an astounding novelty that over the years just grew to be the expected. While sometimes I'd have to catch myself in a moment of "what the hell am I doing here?" clarity as I was plunking down sixty bucks for a playset of Spiritmongers in 2001, it was shocking how readily it was to accept that, just a handful of years later, players were plunking down two hundred dollars for playsets of Tarmogoyf.


That's the dirty and hard truth about Magic: The Gathering; after a quarter decade of precedent, players of the game expect their cards to be of some sort of value as they nestle them in sleeves for playing or binders for future use. It's a crazy phenomena, just like any collectible when you consider how insane it is that an inanimate object is valued at anything just because of the emotional attachment a human being willing to pay that amount has for said thing, but that's where we are and have been with Magic for two-and-a-half decades, like comic books, stamps, coins, et al before it. And on top of that Magic has the added bonus of not being a collectible you keep in a covering that you keep in a display case, it's a collectible you keep in a sleeve that you pull out every Friday night at your local gaming store for FNM or weekend Commander and on and on until you, assumably, cash them out for a new house because adulthood has caught up to you, or they actually become hand-me-downs for all our nerd children that will get their faces rubbed in the dirt for being the virgin dorks they are, like their parents before them.


Obviously, though, we have either hit or are at that aforementioned tipping point. Because of the long, long history of the game and just the massive pool of cards in general, it's just common sense that the most popular way to play the game of Magic now is some sort of long-term, "eternal" format. Between the card variety at hand and the concept that, essentially, since those formats are usually pretty entrenched in what is the cream of the crop in them, once you buy in you're set for a while, with the occasional upgrade. Also, this dodges the constant churn of standard, the format for the most recent cards, because cards move in and out of that format on a yearly basis, meaning if you want to invest your time and money in standard, you're in for a constant flux of your time spent brewing new decks for the format and financing them every time a new set comes out and changes the format. The problem with all of this I just outlined, and what I think is now the core problem with Magic and why the "natives are restless" as I titled this, is that the state of Magic in ALL formats and for financial purposes is in constant, erratic flux.




This ties into the point I was trying to make in that aforementioned piece I wrote a couple weeks ago about how much product Wizards of the Coast (a division of Hasbro) is now pushing these days because Magic is its biggest cash cow. The stability is no longer there, across the board. Now with the game's designers targeting actual specific formats with a large swath of its production in a year, the stability of these older formats no longer exists. Now instead of just occasionally adding a new card or two with each new Standard set in a year to your Commander and maybe building around a new General that interested you in  one of the yearly Commander-specific preconstructed decks Wizards made, you are constantly on the lookout for new cards from sets that Wizards makes specifically to shake up these older formats. Sets like Conspiracy and Battlebond set the stages for this, designed as multiplayer-centric experiences within themselves, but also to showcase cards people would obviously want for their "fun" decks. And then Wizards started to design entire sets specifically for the more competitive Eternal formats, kicked off by the debut of Modern Horizons last year, which completely turned the entirety of the Modern format on its head ever since.


AND IF THAT WEREN'T ENOUGH! the power level of the cards being produced in the new, Standard-defining sets has pushed upwards as well, meaning there's more cards than ever coming through brand new sets that are causing turmoil in everything Eternal. Cards so powerful that bannings have been happening in pretty record pace across the board for a couple years now, meaning that not only has the game become more of a financial churn because of new additions, now people are rapidly bleeding invested money because cards they bought to stay up-to-date are essentially worthless. So now you have an unprecedented acceleration of new cards, an exponential amount of bannings rendering cards unusable, and a trend to rapid obsolescence of cards that means even more churn of decks. That sure sounds like a big old pool of flammable materials pooling up there for the game in general; what could be the match that finally ignites it all like half the country this weekend? Oh, right, the actual lock-solid, "these will always be good and necessary" staples of formats across the board have skyrocketed in recent years due to lack of reprints, a desire of people to at least have some semblance of a reliable card base, and the continued popularity of the game, despite all its foibles.


The first time WotC decides to reprint a set of fetchlands in three years and it's in a limited product that they almost begrudgingly sent to retailers instead of selling for themselves and that cost several hundred dollars given what they set their costs at for a handful of pieces of cardboard in a nice box. This didn't even begin to quench the demand thirst for these cards and poured barrels of oil down an already slippery slope that the Secret Lair product is by having Wizards directly acknowledge that individual cards are worth money and trying to capitalize on it. After this debacle, Wizards did end up coming back to everyone, hat in hand, to say that REPRINTS ARE ON THE WAY!!... in another premium product. Not just any premium product, a big old affair featuring double the amount of foils, rares, and extended art "box toppers" per box, all for the "low, low price" of three hundred dollars for one of those boxes, because the company has gone completely tone deaf.


Again, I believe that Wizards has a difficult task to manage every single day they produce the game because they have to not only find new means and ways of continuing to keep cards and formats exciting but they also have to fill an affordability need for a large chunk of players while also not alienating another hefty portion of players by rendering their cards worthless. That said, three hundred dollar boxes are not the way. Premiumly priced products are fine when they are a unique product in the vein of "one time only" affair. Yes, I understand, the exclusivity of something like that is always going to feel alienating, but if executed properly it usually ends up being a "progressive tax" on those with more flexible incomes to generate the revenue for more widespread product. Reprints, though, ABSOLUTELY SHOULD BE THE WIDESPREAD PRODUCT!! It's one thing to do somewhat of a price upgrade in a means to keep value on a gradual decline, for reasons I outlined above, but reprints to cards that are completely fundamental to the smooth playability of several formats is just ripe for disaster, and sure enough Wizards has already reaped what they have sowed in the form of online blowback. You simply cannot leave the barrier of entry to those with the most income. I don't know if you've looked at America in general these days, but that kind of mentality is kind of drowning the vast majority of us; that kind of mentality in a game people play as a damned hobby is like tying cinderblocks to your ankles while going out for that casual swim.



With all of those open wounds on the game of Magic: The Gathering, it's no wonder it feels like it's a bit of a, dare I say it, dying animal. Player confidence is currently shot because, simultaneously, you can't feel safe playing the competitive format for new cards due to rampant banning, you can't play the older format because Wizards tinkering directly with them is leaving them in constant flux, and you can't play the most casually reliable format because poor reprint policy has rendered a breadth of the staples unaffordable. And as I hope I've made clear by now, people are heavily invested in this game, both financially and emotionally, and that is a huge, huge strength of the game and to it's longevity, hopefully so much so that the fanbase will stick around to help it survive through this tumultuousness. But Wizards is apparently a big bus of insomniacs with everyone passed out asleep and no one at the wheel. Someone at Wizards understands the economics of making money from the game but not the economics of the people spending on it. The design team obviously understands how to make mechanics that push the power of cards to make them exciting but not to stop them from running wild on a format and rendering it unplayable. Wizards of the Coast knows how to make great game that people what to invest time and money into, but they don't know how to reign themselves in, or there's someone making decisions from on high who is willing to cut that longevity off at the knees if it means making shareholders happy now.


Right now this country is obviously doing a lot of very overdue soul-searching, and I know the day-to-day decision making of a tabletop game designed to hook teenagers and hold onto them as long as possible is absolutely minuscule in comparison to what is going on in the streets of America. Hell, I only kept writing this because it was a distraction from several hours a day of watching fellow Americans get goddamn truncheoned in the streets because they had the audacity to go out and loudly proclaim "our black brothers and sisters are hurting right now!" But, people are looking for positive things to focus on and a game they've spent years loving with fellow nerds and the community around it is a good starting point. I do genuinely think that as a whole the team at Wizards knows reprints are a problem and wanted to make 2020 a year for concerted effort to addressing this issue. The Mystery Booster product that came out earlier in the year was an unexpected and surprise in the depth of card pool it reprinted but a limited print run left it not quite having the full impact it could have had. We're seeing some Core Set leaks that seem juicy but, by the nature of those kinds of sets, a couple juiced mythic rares are about the best we can come to expect. And then, of course Double Masters is a disaster in multiple ways except probably the actual contents of the set itself, though that remains to be seen. That quantity makes it clear someone somewhere has the motivation to tackle this issue but the approach is wrong or, even worse, mostly in the hands of the people who make decisions based solely on bottom line, damn the consequences. It would really be a shame to throw away near thirty years of one of the best games ever created simply because restraint is a word that doesn't seem to exist in the halls of where the game is made, but this is definitely a possibility and a horrifying one at that. The stakes aren't anywhere near as high as a lot of other things going on in this country and world right now, but we all could use something positive in our lives right now and a game like Magic that we all hold dear is a good starting point, provided it finds some stability in these rocky times.