A day outside of my normal schedule, since I should have been at work tonight. But it was my birthday, and I gave myself the gift of scheduling PTO to take a half-week off from work.
This opened me up to head out to the card shop, pick up my preordered Magic x Final Fantasy Commander deck (Scions and Spellcraft - I do love me some Final Fantasy XIV), and play a bunch of FFTCG.
I showed up ridiculously early, but that gave me time to rearrange a few things with my decks and sleeve up the aforementioned MtG precon.
When another player did finally arrive, we chatted for a little bit before sitting down to play almost a half-dozen games together. I will note that, due to our fourth player arriving spectacularly late, we did not play an especially organized tournament for the night, but instead had a bit of Round Robin-style casual games with each other.
Dragoons vs SOLDIERs - Win
For our first game, I wanted to try out my freshly (re-)built Dragoons list. Dragoons were my "first love" when I started ordering cards to build proper decks for the FFTCG, and a few weeks back at the Local Qualifier one of the local players brought a Dragoon deck and managed to make the Top 8, which inspired me to rebuild my Dragoons, having sidelined them a long time ago first for Kingsglaive and then for my Mono-Lightning Scions list.
And my goodness, what a correct call that was. The sheer amount of fun I had with these Dragoons cannot be understated. Now, the list I linked above is not technically accurate to my current list. I don't have the 2-drop Theatrhythm Aranea, instead having a significantly worse 4-drop Dragoon in her place, because I simply do not own any copies of that Aranea at the moment. But I digress.
I didn't keep particularly detailed notes about what happened in this game, but the SOLDIERs and I had a pretty fun back and forth with each other, but I eventually cleared the way, I believe using Freya's Cherry Blossom Special Ability, and swung for the victory.
After this game, the other player and I, still the only two present at the shop, each pulled out different decks.
Crystals vs Scions - Win
This turned into a Best of 3 between these two decks, two of which I took the win in.
In the first game, I got Salamander (III) in play when I had Spiritus and Firion both out, which enabled me to pay 2 Crystals, pop two of their Forwards and immediately net a Crystal back from Firion, and then at the end of my turn generate a second off of Spiritus. Those two Crystals then fueled Salamander's ability over the next several turns, as I paid the Crystals to pop Forwards each time my Salamander swung, netting me two Crystals back each time between the two generators. It was a pretty smooth victory from that point, as the Scions couldn't keep Forwards in play to power their own abilities.
In the second game, it went hard in the opposite direction. I didn't have consistent removal, and I burned a Cyan 5-Crystal Nuke entirely too early in the game which bit me hard later on when I couldn't keep their board state under control.
The third game, which I won again, saw me get turn 1 Warrior of Light into a Turn 2 Onion Knight searching for Fire/Lightning Y'shtola, giving me an incredible amount of momentum right out of the gate, especially as I was able to pop the Estinien that they had opened with thanks to Y'shtola's ability.
After this, we each changed decks yet again, as still nobody else had arrived.
Golbez/Yuna/Vikings vs Warriors - Win
The predominantly-Fire Warriors deck had numerous Board Wipes, but I was able to fight my way through them all to do Yuna/Viking things fueled by Golbez keeping my board well-stocked with Forwards. It was a pretty fun game to play, and some much needed practice if I'm going to potentially keep to using the Golbez deck throughout the next handful of major competitive events that are happening over the summer.
This was the point where our other players started arriving, one player significantly in advance of the other. When finally the fourth did arrive, I shuffled up to play against them.
Dragoons vs Sky Pirates - Loss
Doing effectively a best of 3, and I lost both of the games that we played together.
In our first game, I had some issue filling my board which left the Sky Pirates plenty of room to outrace me, plus I made a couple of misplays throughout the game that didn't help me at all.
The second was an incredibly tight affair, coming down to the fact that my opponent had a Qiqirn Backup active that they were able to use to Break what would have been my game-winning attacker after the attack was declared. During the turn that this barely scraped together for them, their Sky Pirates were able to rebuild a full board that gave enough of their Forwards Haste to take their last two shots at me and clinch the victory.
This was where I moved to my final opponent for the night.
Dragoons vs Cat IV Yuna - Win
Again, effectively a best of 3. I won our first two games, "winning" said Bo3, but we did play a third game afterwards just for the sake of getting more games in.
The first game gave us both slightly slow starts. We each just built up our Backup lines, but thanks to my getting Alus in play, I was able to generate a ton of extra value thanks to effectively drawing three cards a turn. This combined with getting Freya in play to throw around Cherry Blossoms numerous times, each to devastating, board-clearing effect meant that I took Game 1 cleanly and fairly quickly.
Our second game, I opened with all three copies of the Cherry Blossom Freya in my hand, which drastically slowed down my start. Once I finally got an Alus in play and built up my backups, I dropped Freya with enough other Dragoons in play to make swinging into me a somewhat risky proposition. My opponent did get Yuna in play, but the turns that Freya bought for me gave me time to establish a firmer position, and once again I unleashed utterly devastating Cherry Blossoms to wipe out my opponent's board.
This was the point where we played another, third game, and I got bodied hard. My opponent's turn 1 was the same 5-drop Cecil I run in my Crystals deck, whose auto-ability was used to drop the 4-Color Warrior of Light, which gave such an enormous amount of momentum that even though they spent a few turns drawing and passing to recoup their resources, I was unable to break through what they had and got handily beaten down. Especially so after they dropped a Frimelda that gave them even more value for having so many elements in play, using that to play Ice/Lightning Zeromus and bringing their total number of elements-in-play up to 6, meaning Frimelda could stick a -12k power loss onto any one of my Forwards at the start of combat.
All in all, the sheer amount of FFTCG I got to play tonight was fantastic and some much-needed fun. And the sheer enjoyment I got from playing Dragoons again after so long, it was so wildly worth rebuilding that deck.
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