After some initial concern that we wouldn't have enough people decide to come along for FFTCG tonight, we did ultimately wind up with a total of 4 players, allowing a small round robin-style "tournament" for the night.
Wanting to finally give the deck a good go after some changes made to it a little while back, I pulled out my Crystals deck. Not just testing out the deck's changes, I was also looking to see if the deck perhaps has enough teeth from a competitive standpoint that I could potentially play it at the remaining Local Championship Qualifiers that I plan to attend this season.
Game 1 vs Warriors - Loss
This game was a fun back-and-forth affair that ended up feeling pretty close to me. In the end, the final damage score was 4-7 in my opponent's favor. The Warriors were able to stabilize enough to work around my removal, and I never saw quite potent enough mass removal to destabilize them.
Plus I keep forgetting Volker reduces the cost of a Warrior by 3. This meant that when I played Zidane to scout for an Amaterasu, where I had an opportunity to have removed Volker, I didn't take that chance. This is what gave my opponent the ability to stabilize as much as they did, since Volker grabbed Taivas, who could then be played for just 2, which in turn searched for Ward to remove the Salamander I had just used to remove their Ifrit (XVI).
Game 2 vs Sky Pirates - Loss
So this was the game where I figured out exactly why Sky Pirates is nicknamed "Sky Rats".
I had a decently strong start, but my opponent had an even better opening and practically exploded on to the board. I was able to drop Cyan and use his on-entry auto-ability to generate the Crystals I needed to wipe the Sky Pirates' board.
Balthier's effect saving Fran, and Kites's effect saving Balthier meant that during my opponent's turn, all I had done was slow down their ability to attack by a single turn, because they rebuilt all but immediately, leaving me with practically no resources left to fight back.
Despite that, however, the game still ended fairly close again, this one being 5-7 in my opponent's favor.
Game 3 vs Mono-Earth - Loss
This wound up as my worst showing of the night, with my only dealing a single point of damage to my opponent.
We both had pretty decent openings, spending a few turns building board states and backup lines. My opponent's backups were both a touch more numerous, and slightly better quality thanks to Clarus searching Epitav, who in turn could search for the 1-drop Earth Leo Forward that allows backups to produce any element. This meant my opponent, with about four backups, was able to go a little crazy, getting 4-Element Warrior of Light in play, followed by an Unei that I had to remove.
Of course, I didn't help myself by dropping my LB Emperor one turn later than I should have, as I put it into play the turn after my opponent had done all of their searches. Given the way the rest of the game went, I'm not sure it would have helped me much at all, as they were able to power out high-cost, high-value Forwards turn after turn.
My one shot to turn the game around had been on my very final turn, dropping Cyan and attempting to generate a full 5 Crystals with him. Unfortunately, after I dumped all of my resources into the play, my opponent used Amaterasu to stop the actual generation and remove Cyan from the game. Using the 4 Crystals that I'd already had, I popped Warrior of Light in retaliation, but the damage was done. With two copies of Spiritus in hand, I was out of gas, and my opponent finished the job without much issue, ending the game, as I noted above, at 1-7.
Conclusion
Honestly, even if I didn't take a single game, this was much needed for me. I think that tonight's the most my Crystal deck has ever "behaved" for me, as often my draws feel like my deck doesn't care much for me, and I had desperately missed playing it. Plus, as I said at the start, I'd made a couple of changes to it that I wanted to test out, so getting that opportunity was nice.
And while I've come to the conclusion that it has some teeth, competitively speaking, it's just not quite enough to serve as an option for the remaining LCQs of the season. In the two games where things came closest for me, I wasn't quite able to seal the deal. And while both Warriors and Sky Pirates are legitimately viable contenders in the current meta, neither is fully a "Tier 1" list, so being able to hang with them is a good sign, but not being able to take the win over either is a little stronger of a bad one.
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