After Saturday's LQ and yesterday's Pokémon GLC proved to be two different flavors of frustrating for me, but both seeing me go on a heavy losing streak, I was hoping to head into today's locals with a little more of a clear mind and calmer emotions.
Myself and another player arrived early, and played a couple of casual games. In the interest of wanting to get more games in with my 47 Forward Golbez deck, that was the deck I played in every game today.
Casual Game vs. Water/Lightning Monsters - Loss
Much like my game against the same list at Saturday's LQ, this game did not go well for me. An early Ixion wiped my board, and Witch of the Fens kept me from building back after.
Casual Game vs. Warriors - Loss
A second game against the same opponent, this time with them running a very different deck. I think this is the first time I've played against Warriors, with any of my decks. But I digress.
I wound up losing all of my Yunas - the first was removed from the game by Wind/Fire Zidane, the second was sent into Damage, and the third I did successfully play, but it eventually got removed by a Brynhildr. However, I got a Golbez in play afterwards, and was able to use that to build my board state back up. Even though my field was mostly fairly weak Forwards, I was able to produce a sufficient board state that I could take the victory.
I'd actually realized, on my second-to-last turn, that if I had played things just slightly differently, I could have won a turn earlier than I had. I swung with my Golbez, when I could have stolen my opponent's larger blocker with Golbez and successfully gotten enough damage through with Leo and my Vikings. Unfortunately, I did the math wrong and didn't realize it, but fortunately my opponent wasn't able to capitalize and snatch the victory away from me.
After this game, the two of us both wanted to get up and stretch our legs a little, the rest of our players for the night had shown up, and so we bought in and began our locals in earnest. A total of five of us arrived, meaning we did have one player receive a bye in each round. I was not the recipient of any of these bye rounds, which was fortunate as I did want to get practice with my deck.
Game 1 vs. Archfiends - Win
I got a small board built over the first couple of turns, getting three or four Vikings, Yuna, and another incidental Forward in play, and that was sufficient to keep the Archfiends locked down and unable to play.
Decidedly not helping my opponent's case was that on their turn 1 or 2, they made an attempt to play a 5-cost Hecatoncheir in an attempt to wipe my board, but two Yuna Taxes on the Summon kept my field safe, and left them without any remaining resources, which played a significant role in my ability to keep them locked out.
Game 2 vs. Water/Lightning Monsters - Loss
Turns out this is still a bad matchup for me. I rebuilt after an Ixion wiped me out, but then a Lightning-element Serah hit the table and gave my board a blanket -2000 power debuff, wiping out most of my Forwards, and leaving even my Golbez vulnerable to getting taken out by a single activation of the Witch of the Fens. This meant that I was unable to rebuild again afterwards, and could do precious little to stop my opponent from taking the win.
Game 3 vs. Warriors of Light/Refia - Win
My first turn saw me drop Materia and Yuna alongside a Viking or two. I only snowballed from there, and managed to keep my opponent locked out of their Earth Backups, meaning that the only mass removal that they had ready access to - LB Shantotto - was out of reach for them. They never drew any of their other mass removal options, either, which meant there was nothing they could do to stop my momentum.
After the conclusion of the third round, myself and my final opponent played a few more games for fun and practice with each of our respective decks.
3 Casual Games vs. Warriors of Light - Won All 3
In the first game of the three, I opened with Golbez, Yuna, and three Vikings, which was the start of an incredibly rapid snowball. They did manage to get Refia in play and bottom-decked my Yuna, but I had a second in hand and was able to drop the LB Warrior of Light to protect the rest of my field from Refia's removal.
In the second, I opened with Merlywb, searched Golbez and dropped him in play. I flipped Materia from my Attack Phase trigger, and promptly discarded the Cagnazzo I had intended to keep so that I could search out Yuna. They were unable to find any removal to stop me, and momentum was heavily on my side from that point.
And then in the third and final game, they opened with Fire/Wind Zidane and removed a Golbez I had in my opening hand from the game, but with two Merlwybs in my opening hand, I swiftly searched out a second one and started powering out value with his effect. They did finally see their Opus 1 Backup Shantotto in this game and wiped out my board, but the very next turn I top-decked my third Golbez and they were unable to stop the value engine from running away with the game.
Conclusion
I do still want to play with this list more for experience, but I think I've got a solid handle on it at this point. I'm starting to think that I just hard-lose to Water/Lightning Monsters - any Lightning deck, to some extent, due to the fact that Ixion is an inexpensive way for them to decimate my board, but Monsters have been the only lists I've seen running the Serah that passively wipes out half of my deck's Forwards - but I otherwise seem to have fairly solid matchups, mostly.
Any deck that has a lot of mass removal, or the ability to at least keep Golbez and/or Yuna off of the field will have better odds at stopping me in my tracks, but as I found during my casual game with Warriors before tonight had started in earnest, I can work around not having Yuna, then in my game with Archfiends I saw I can function without Golbez, but I can't deal with losing both. Golbez is what generates my board presence and value, and Yuna is my primary payoff for all of that value.
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