Those of you who are through my first season to Rising Vanguards should know that after concluding the tournament, Brick left for Gainesville to work on his Gator-chomp. Looking back, I'm sure glad I had him leave for character balance and character development reasons.

I would have given him the best break ride and thus I would have been forced to make him lose to another player in a contrived way, (enemy lucksacking, missed ride, etc.) to make him unable to perform his break ride. Granted, letting him get off his break ride once would have been good to see, but let's face it; he burned through most of one opponent's 8-card hand once when using Dudley Emperor... and that didn't even involve Dragger, so I'm sure you can imagine him mowing down some Duke player's 9-card hand WITH the break ride. 26k, 26k, 31k, 33k, 32k. Yeah he usually still has a medical manager by the time he gets that far.

In terms of character development, I wasn't exactly finding many opportunities in my first season to show the family lives of my characters. All you really got to see in that respect was Tetsuya's sister convincing him not to change clans and a mention of where Brick's parents met. I had their family lives figured out, but I couldn't figure out places to slip that information in. I had plans to make Brick's family life stand out from what everyone else has.

All in all, I'd be too focused on finding contrived methods of making brick lose for the sake of the plot to really explore the personality inside his silent shell, while by bringing Yuuji back to the team, I have a funny guy to work with. I can make a team of clowns show up at regionals. I can make some joke where he overreacts to Natsuko having some doubts about him.