Final Fantasy TCG Locals - October 20th, 2025

 In a phenomenal change of pace, Locals tonight saw a turnout of 13 people in total!

I presume that the shop running a Win-a-Box event as part of some celebrations for their anniversary likely had some hand in that turnout. But hey, we take what we can get, regardless of why we get it.

As there was a full Box of Gunslinger on the line, I put away my Scions for the night, and instead pulled out my Dragoons instead. For better or for worse, the 'goons are still my best overall deck.

Well, aside from technically my World Champ precons, but I'm drastically more well-practiced with the Dragoons than either of those. I digress.

Before we got underway for the night, several players showed up early and we decided to grind a few games out. I played my fellow Pokémon Professor, who wanted to get actual practice in with a new deck that they had built, and I wanted to shake off the rust as I haven't played Dragoons in some time.

Friendly Games vs Mono-Fire - Win

So this wasn't strictly a Best of 3 Set, but we did play two games against one another, both of which I managed to win.

In both games, I was able to come out of the gates swinging, and the mono-fire list wasn't able to meet the aggression with sufficient removal. The Freya from Gunslinger came in clutch, clearing away no small number of threatening bodies, and LB Kain made sure I had a Freya on-hand at almost all times.

Considering that this was the first time that they had actually played the list against another person, however, and that the Dragoons seem to be a rough matchup for the deck, they did remarkably well for themselves.

After this, we began our Win-a-Box event in earnest.

Round 1 vs Dragoons - Win

Starting the night off with a Dragoon Mirror Match, and I was hyped as hell about it. Their list was markedly different from the lists I've been accustomed to seeing for Dragoons, still running the mono-water Freya and the King of Burmecia, alongside a few other oddities such as Vrtra.

In fact, a big thing that set the pace of the game in my favor was that, although I went second, I was able to get Alus online on turn 1 and hit a Dragoon off of it immediately. My opponent didn't get their Alus in play until their second turn (so admittedly not that much worse off), but their first reveal was a copy of Vrtra. This meant that I was able to get ahead on resources and ultimately won the back-and-forth volley of removal that our Freyas leveled at each other.

Round 2 vs Sky Pirates - Loss

My opponent went first and had a nearly ideal setup turn, playing Fran into a free-played Larsa backup, who in turn grabbed Basch, which hit the table and gave them another card in-hand with Basch's start-of-combat trigger.

I went second, and spent nearly every resource I had to barely end the turn with an Alus in hand. I also did spend a few to drop LB Cloud and pop Fran, because I knew how the rabbit could otherwise let the Sky Pirates get out of hand far too easily. On turn 2, they dropped a few other Forwards, including 2-drop Yuna, and on my turn 2, that Yuna made sure I didn't get to replace a card-in-hand when I spent my resources to play the Alus.

From there, after setting the tone of the game so brazenly, my opponent proceeded to absolutely pick me apart over the rest of the game.

Round 3 vs The Twelve - Win

Going first this time, I had turn 1 Alus and Ricard leaving me with 2 backups and a Cherry Blossom Freya in-hand. My opponent also had a solid Turn 1 Setup, managing to land their Llymlaen that would ultimately allow The Twelve to "play the game" as the Navigator's color-fixing for The Twelve is vital to the deck running at all.

From there, the game played out fairly similar to my Round 1 mirror match, with Alus setting me up with ample resources that ultimately saw me the winner of the back-and-forth on removal, giving me the game in the end. It was a tense game for me nonetheless, given the power that The Twelve have once the deck manages to get itself set up.

It really made The Twelve look like a super tempting deck for me to try building. Unfortunately, I know I'm still missing too many pieces that would make the deck properly tick.

Round 4 vs Warriors - Loss

That's right, we had four rounds of play tonight! That's the power of a Win-a-Box bringing people out in decent numbers!

Anyways.

I went first, and took a few turns to find an Alus, which slowed me down a fair bit. The game was incredibly back-and-forth, being one of the best games I think I've ever played with the Warriors player (they normally run Mono-Earth or Refia/WoLs, so Warriors is a little outside their normal wheelhouse), but ultimately I wasn't able to cinch it.

Part of that was that on two separate turns, I dropped the Gunslinger Freya, and was ready to swing her in as removal for some troublesome Forwards, only for "end of Main 1, Cuchulainn the Freya" to strip away her Haste and her attack trigger. Unable to remove problem Forwards not once, but twice meant that the Warriors player was able to, well, keep those problem Forwards in order to make them my problems, also allowing them to remove my Freyas on the following turns.

Conclusion

Gods I have missed the Dragoons. I was super glad tonight was a little more of a competitive night so that I had the excuse to pull them back out.

I may have went 2-2 in the event proper, breaking dead even instead of having a winning record, but that's fine. I had a blast playing the deck again, and was super glad that we had the turnout that we did.

Still have to do some work with my Scions list to work out the kinks in it, I think, but I'm looking forward to doing that as well. Given some of the spoilers we've seen for the next set - Journey of Discovery - I'm honestly incredibly tempted to shift back to a Mono-Lightning list for them, which I have a few ideas on how to build them a little better than they had been the last time I had them as Mono-Lightning.

But I don't think I'm quite ready to go that route yet.

Yet.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - October 6th, 2025

 In a bizarre, but fantastic turn of events, we had seven players in total show up for FFTCG Locals tonight.

A few of us showed up rather early for the event, and I played a few friendlies with one of them before we got properly started for the night.

Friendly Games: Scions vs Ice/Lightning Exdeath - Win

We played two games against one another due to the amount of time we had available.

This was, plainly speaking, a wild pair of games for me. Thanks to Estinien saving a few key Scions from my Break Zone, I was able to keep enough removal on-hand to avoid the worst of what Exdeath could've accomplished, along with various other dangerous Forwards.

But man, losing my entire Break Zone like that did so much to make this game feel so much weirder than usual.

After this, almost everybody else playing tonight showed up, with one late arrival after we started Round 1, so we started the event in earnest. I played my Scions list for the duration of said event. We had a three-round event tonight.

Round 1 vs Cadets - Loss

We were both playing incredibly aggressive decks. They saw their removal sooner and more consistently than I did, plus they were able to get backups in play to give them the advantage in resources over the course of the game.

It wasn't strictly easy for them, but it was fairly quick.

Round 2 vs Refia - Win

Despite my having a much larger, stronger board presence for almost the entire game, they had exactly enough decent Forwards in play to keep me at bay, as the trades wouldn't have worked out super well in my favor. Eventually, after a much longer game than what it should have been, I punched the damage through, mostly battering them with my newly-added Phoinix.

Round 3 vs The Twelve - Loss

The Twelve are kinda cracked. Or, at the very least, it certainly felt that way for me. They seemed to get everything they needed to just absolutely eat me alive. I had am aggressive opening, dropping Urianger, Zenos, and Ra-la into play, and that getting met by them dropping an even larger board presence, leaving them with Backups and Byregot, and one of those backups was Althyk who was able to immediately pop Ra-la.

This set the tone for the game, where they proceeded to have almost exactly the counter for everything I dropped into play. I did put some damage on them, but they ran away hard with the game once they got a few more Twelve in play, with Halone being the final nail in my coffin.

After that round, I played one more friendly game with the Refia player from Round 2.

Friendly Game: Refia vs Fire/Water Monsters

Wanting a little practice with the Refia list, I pulled out my copy of the Refia World Champ deck, and they played their copy of the Fire/Water Monsters World Champ deck.

I ran away with the game really hard. I set up my backups quickly, used an LB Shantotto to wipe their board, dropped a WoL4 and followed that up with Refia. This just gave me a wildly commanding presence and there was nothing they could do about it.

Conclusion

Focusing on my F/L Scions, I feel like the changes I made to the deck have made it feel better. There's still a lot of room for it to grow, some kinks to work out yet, but I'm liking what I've got going on with it at this point.

Like I said though, I still have to work out a lot of kinks in the list. I got beaten by the Cadets when we both had the same basic game plan, and The Twelve were able to just absolutely dominate the game against me.

Maybe the deck needs Clive/Ifrit, although that would wildly change the way it plays. Maybe Ra-la is a mistake and I need to consider removing it from the deck, since it often doesn't accomplish anything for me, and changing that out to, say, return the second copy of Lyse and third Alphinaud to the list wouldn't drastically change the way I want it to play.

I don't know. There's time still for me to figure it out.

Month (Mostly) Off - October 2025

The month of October is, typically speaking, an incredibly busy one for me. 

In addition to my work schedule, which already keeps me effectively nonexistent to the world at large for a week at a time, I dedicate a lot of time to working at a haunted house throughout the month. 

Said haunted house runs throughout the weekend - Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Sundays, it operates earlier in the afternoon to do "no scare matinee" shows.

This means that a lot of my usual TCG time - Friday Commander Nights, the Sunday Gundam TCG that I've only made it to once so far, and my Sunday Pokémon League - are left on the wayside. 

And that will remain the case until November. This in addition to having other things going on over my next few Thursdays off (which eats my other Pokémon League night) means that the only TCG I'll have time for this month will be my Monday Night Final Fantasy TCG.

So I'll see you all on Monday for FFTCG.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - September 22nd, 2025

 We had four people show up for tonight's FFTCG Locals, which meant we had a full, proper "event" tonight.

Myself and one other player arrived early, and played a Best of 3 set against one another as we waited for our other players.

Refia/Warriors of Light vs Cadets

So, not strictly-speaking my deck, but:

I bought a copy of the 2024 World Champion Decks, a product that Square themselves put out in commemoration of, well, the 2024 world champion. For around $50 or $60, it gave me several hundreds of dollars worth of cards in the form of the two decks used by Hara Y. when they won.

And, unlike some other card games I could name, these World Championship decks are completely legal for play.

I've wanted a Refia deck for absolute ages, and the Fire/Water Monster list gives me access to a bunch of other cards, albeit not necessarily ones I strictly intended to use unedited.

So before we got started in earnest with our event for the night, I decided to pull out the Refia/WoL deck.

And of the three games, I won one of them.

The first game that we played, the Cadets had little choice but to hit me to 4, which activated my many effects, in addition to giving me a fistful of resources through EX Bursts. This gave me the ability to handily run away with the game.

In the second, both of us had games that, to me at least, felt pretty odd, in the only way I can think of to describe it. The Cadets did figure their way around my board position, and took the win.

The third game also went to the Cadets, though not for lack of effort on my part. My first turn, I decided to dump my hand to give myself three Backups, playing a Clarus into a King Tycoon, who in turn gave me a copy of Lenna. From there, I tried to play a little more conservatively to rebuild my resources, but it wasn't sufficient. The mass of removal that the Cadets have access to kept me under control.

It was during Game 3 that our other two players arrived, so the four of us began our night in earnest.

Scions vs Cadets - Loss... Sort of

Despite my efforts to play an aggressive game, the Cadets out-aggro'd me and found enough resources to keep my board under control via tremendous amounts of removal. An early Ifrit (XVI) was a big boon to their game plan, helping to eliminate what was a dangerously full board state I had produced.

As we finished our game much faster than our other two players, the two of us wound up playing out a Best of 3 set while we waited.

In the second and third games, I was able to run my deck aggressively, and my opponent didn't find their removal. A timely Odin EX Burst popping a Clive was also key to my victory in one game, as it meant that they were unable to prime into Ifrit and demolish my board as they had in game 1.

So while I lost the game that mattered for the sake of our event tonight, I took the overall win if it had been a Best of 3.

Vs Pirates/Vikings - Loss

This one was a difficult game for me, one that I lost when my opponent dropped Azdaja from Gunslinger in the Abyss. Turns out that the combination of Vikings swarming the field and Azdaja turning their attacks into removal was wildly potent.

Turns out Bikke also effectively turns off my Y'shtola's Pulse of Creation against the majority of a Vikings board state, not that I ever managed to have the resources in-hand to be able to use Pulse of Creation.

Vs Fire/Water Monsters - Win

The other World Champion deck, this one piloted by another of the shop's Pokémon Professors. They didn't actually drop any of the deck's monsters, but between an early Clive/Ifrit (XVI) and the F/W Firion hitting the table in the late game, they were able to put some massive hurdles in front of me that made this game incredibly hard to work around.

I did eventually take the game, having removed the Ifrit and then used Yotsuyu to to circumvent the Firion's ability to bulk itself up by preventing it from blocking.

Day Off - September 19th, 2025

Normally tonight would be Commander Night at the card shop for me.

However, this weekend, I'm busy with the fact that there is a Pokémon Regional Championship I am attending. Consequently, I'll be skipping out on both Commander tonight, and the Gundam TCG on Sunday. 

Which is a doozy of a thing to do just before my big "month off" for October, especially for Gundam as I've only just started playing that game. 

I digress.

I'll be back on Monday with Final Fantasy TCG.

Final Fantasy TCG Locals - September 8th, 2025

 Only one other person showed up for tonight's locals. Not shocked, a little disappointed, but it's feeling pretty common.

Regardless, we got a good four games in against one another. For all four of those games I played my Scions, both because I'm still trying to get more practice in with them and because I made a tweak to them after my last Locals night, swapping Warp Estinien out and putting the Opus 23 Estinien back in.

My opponent, for their part, played Sky Pirates for all four games, as they're trying to test some changes to it in preparation for the upcoming Last Chance Qualifier that will be happening in a couple of weeks, the day before the United States Championship.

Game 1 - Loss

This game went pretty quickly in their favor.

They hit three EX Bursts off my first three damage, giving them a fistful of resources in a deck that thrives on that sort of resource glut thanks to their pile of free-play effects and reduced costs. Not much I could do against that sort of overwhelming resource advantage.

Game 2 - Win

This time, they didn't have the Burst Luck that let them overwhelm me in the first game. Meanwhile, I opened aggressively, swinging early with Estinien and pulling so many cards back to my hand over the course of the game that I was the one with the overwhelming advantage in resources.

Game 3 - Loss

This one was just kind of a solid game where neither of us had any particularly crazy luck, good or bad.

They drew their value pieces sooner than I saw mine, and that gave them the edge over the course of the game.

Were this a normal Bo3 set, they would have taken the set here.

Game 4 - Win

The last game we were able to get in at the end of the night, and probably the best of the games that we got in.

They went first and had an explosive turn 1, dropping in Fran, Balthier, Penelo, and a backup Larsa all for effectively 2cp. On my turn, I followed up with Alisaie into G'raha Tia, searching Y'shtola to remove Fran, and I ended the turn with a Reeve and a second Y'shtola in hand, meaning I could effectively Pulse of Creation close to at-will.

Ultimately, the Pulse came out several turns of buildup later, when I had a slightly larger board that included a Ra-la, and they dropped in Asura, Manusya of War in an attempt to wipe my board. My Pulse meant the board wipe became a mutual total-clear.

I was able to rebuild a little faster, getting an Estinien to start getting in damage and getting my resources back from the Break Zone. Dropping an Amaterasu to stop their Fran's on-entry free play wound up being the play that won me the game in the long run, as it denied them the resources from getting to play Balthier off of Fran, which would have seen them build their board back extensively.

Putting a stop to that explosive rebuild meant that I was able to establish a board that they were unable to overcome, and I took the win after a handful more turns.

Conclusion

Two weeks ago, I wasn't able to take a single game against the Sky Pirates, and tonight I was able to keep it 50/50 against them, I feel like swapping Estiniens around was 100% the correct answer for the deck. I also feel like there's probably something that the deck needs still, but just the one change made it feel much better to me. More removal, I think, wouldn't be remiss. I'll test it a little more over more local events before I decide what I need to add to it, ideally if some other players show up and I can talk to them for suggestions.

I'm also finding that while I built it with the intention of running the list as a fast-paced aggro list, it's feeling better to play it as more of a tempo deck still. The addition of the Fire Element feels like it's doing some not-insignificant work for me compared to when I was running it as Mono-Lightning, at least.

Gundam TCG Locals - September 7th, 2025

 Today was the first day I was finally able to play the Gundam TCG after having bought in decently heavy at the launch of the game - at least, as heavy as I could from my favorite local shop.

And considering the fortunate luck that I could play Gundam, and then walk to the other side of the room to start my Pokémon Professor duties for League...

Well, it was convenient.

I played a Red/Green Zeon list - a picture of it will be at the bottom of this post. I know there are sites out there I could share the list otherwise, but the Bandai TCG app has a decent deck builder on its own, and I can drop the images here.

I digress. It was three rounds of play.

All three of which I lost.

In order, I played against Blue-Red Ping, Academy, and Blue-Green Wing.

I don't think I strictly made any overt errors in play during my games today. I got beaten due to inexperience and my opponents having the outs at the right time.

The only real mistake I made was in the final turn of my last game against Blue-Green Wing. I saw an obvious line of victory - swing to pop my opponent's last Shield, then swing in with a hasted Char's Zaku II for the win. Unfortunately, I played the Char's Zaku II before my attack, and "burst luck" followed me from FFTCG, seeing them flip a Nahel Argama Base from the Shield.

Nahel Argama, on deployment, rested my Char's Zaku, meaning I couldn't swing in to finish the game out. This left my opponent with a Wing and a Wing Zero to finish the game out on their turn.

I could have put an M'Quve on the Char's Zaku II Token I had initially swung with and taken out the Wing, doing Breach damage to the shield, and only after taking out the shield then I could have played my other Char's Zaku II from hand. Unfortunately with the Nahel Argama, I wouldn't have been able to win that turn, but it would have left my opponent in a somewhat trickier position as well.