Today, six people showed up for our local Gym Leader Challenge league, including most of the Professors for the card shop. I want to say it was mostly fun, though two of my games proved more than a little frustrating for me for entirely different reasons.
Three rounds, Best of 1, 40 minute games each. I played a Fairy Control deck.
Game 1 vs. Water - Draw
This was, by far, the best game of the three that I played today. It was an incredibly back and forth game, where I kept my opponent stalled down for several turns at a time, though they found ways to break my locks and start fighting through my defenses. We went all the way to Time and into the final turns of the game, where neither of us were quite able to grab the final victory. I had milled out all but four of the cards from their deck, and by the end of their final turn, they had taken 5 prizes. We both thought that the game was fun and incredibly tight.
Game 2 vs. Fire - Loss
My opponent this round was a literal child, one of the League's younger regular attendees, so keep in mind during all of what I'm about to say about this game, I am incredibly aware that my opponent was a child and that my frustration is not directed towards them in particular:
In terms of actually taking a win during an actual 40 minute round, my deck's biggest weakness is going against an opponent who takes a long, if still reasonable amount of time to play out a turn. They're unfamiliar with their own deck, they're unfamiliar with playing against control decks and how to handle the sort of stalling and walling that my deck intends to engage in, any of a number of reasons like that.
Being a child that is understandably easily distracted - say, by the League running its May end-of-month raffle in the middle of our round - is one such reason for my opponent to take somewhat longer turns.
So while I was trying to get my opponent to focus on our game without being a complete jerk - because, again, literal child - my own attention was not completely on the game itself because of needing to draw my opponent's focus back.
This meant that when they dropped a Skeledirge with an ability protecting them from the effects of my attacks, such as my Klefki trying to confuse it with Metal Sound, or stop it from retreating with Fairy Lock, it did not register to me at the time that the Skeledirge was immune as such.
And this was not caught for a few turns, at which point the game could not be reasonably rewound once an outside observer noticed.
Game 3 vs. Dark - Loss
And following up on my keeping myself from getting too frustrated at a child, I played against another of the shop's Professors and, quite plainly, could not play the game.
I ran out of cards-in-hand fairly early on, and my Cleffa's Excitable Draws accomplished nothing, I was absolutely incapable of landing a Heads on literally any attempt to refill my hand using the ability. This meant I was easily picked apart by my opponent's Nidoking slamming into my Fairies for 190 damage a turn. My bulkiest 'Mon, Xerneas, who even has a Resistance to Dark, only has 130 HP, so Nidoking could still one-shot it with ease, and it was over in incredibly short order.
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