After yesterday saw me not playing any TCGs - I, still effectively jetlagged after my long, exhausting day on Saturday going to a Pokémon Professor Conference, simply helped to run the normal League day and did not so much as touch a single piece of cardboard - today I was one of only two people to show up to FFTCG Locals today.
The two of us played a good dozen games in total, so it was definitely a lot of games played, and good practice for the both of us with our decks. I played two different decks, and my opponent played only their Crystals list.
Dragoons vs Crystals
The first six games we played, I pulled out my Dragoons list, as I haven't played it in some time, and it's the deck I intend to bring with me to the next Local Championship Qualifier in my area. My opponent, for every game we played tonight, used their Crystals, and in fact is the person who heavily informed my own Crystals list.
I took both "sets" 2-1, in multiple games having two Cherry Blossom Freyas ripped away from me by W/F Zidane, but I was able to work around losing so many copies of my primary board wipe. Thanks to the amount of removal that the Dragoons have access to, I was able to take wins. I did once manage to use my third and final Cherry Blossom Freya to good effect by playing it, having it broken on-board, and bringing it back with LB Kain to then activate the Cherry Blossom with a copy of W/L Freya.
As I said, I took both sets 2-1, or effectively I went 4-2 against the Crystals with my Dragoons.
Crystals vs Crystals
Now mostly a mirror match, because I wanted to play my own Crystals for some practice, and I lost these sets, 1-2. Or, in effect, I went 2-4 over the 6 games.
The very first game in our set, I took a quick win after using Amat to stop a Salamander from wiping my board, eating a ton of my opponent's resources thanks to them paying through a Cecil Tax in their attempt to use Salamander's effect. The second and third games were both pretty back and forth in comparison, with game 2 seeing me basically playing as a bad Wind/Fire Aggro list, and game 3 my Crystal Deck played the most Crystal it's ever been before. However, in that third game, I was playing a game without any backups, so when my opponent finally managed to break my board down, I was left bereft of resources and couldn't keep up.
Moving into our second set, I had a significantly better set of backups, giving me much more ample resources. My opponent did manage to use Onion Knight to grab a Lightning DFF Emperor that would make my action abilities - such as Vaan or Cyan's board wipes - more expensive. I did manage to get rid of it, and when my opponent put the search trigger onto the stack, I wiped their board in anticipation of a second copy of that Emperor. When they instead dropped SOPFFO Emperor to get more Crystals and set themselves up with a board wipe I couldn't prevent, it looked a little bad for me. Fortunately, in a reversal of our previous game, I had a collection of more, better backups so I could power through the Emperor and took the first game of the second set.
The next game saw us both flush with backups and resources, but their backups were markedly better - they had their Spiritus, where I did not, giving them a potent buff on the table that made a lot of removal math significantly better for them.
Our absolute final game of the night, opened with the two of us making a bizarre volley of board wipes against one another, which hurt me drastically more than it hurt them. We were both, however, left in a position where we had to regroup and rebuild our resources, and ultimately they took the game because they were better able to build their position back up thanks to having more means to generate resources and draw cards, since they operate in many more colors than my Wind/Fire list.
That final game also saw me make an early, near-dream opening where I used General Leo to play Firion and break one of my opponent's Forwards, generating me a Crystal. I then played Sol, who I then used to play Vaan for another Crystal, with a second Vaan in hand. That felt good, and was what set me up for my side of our early board wipe volleys.
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