I wasn't originally planning to go out to the other card shop today for Locals.
But, honestly, I was a little disappointed with Monday not happening, and wanted to play a few games of FFTCG before the end of my vacation sees me return to work.
Plus, having spent the past few weeks playing nothing but Dragoons in preparation for Sunday's LQ, I kind of really wanted to get in a night playing something else. In particular, I wanted to play my Scions, a deck I've not touched ever since pulling Dragoons back out.
A total of five of us showed tonight, and I played games against three of the others in friendly Best of 3 sets.
Games vs Luso
The same Luso list that's been giving my Dragoons fits for weeks, which I have a devil of a time working around due to the nature of the removal available to that deck.
Scions... Didn't have that issue. Among other things, having as many EX Burst Odins in my list as I do meant that attacking into me often saw me remove one of their Forwards. The Alisaie-return-Y'shtola plays were also sufficient to remove the Luso on their own, meaning I could cut down on their ability to snowball, and only have one or two Forwards to deal with after the fact. Being able to keep Luso under control so relatively easily turned this game from an absolute headache for my Dragoons into a comparatively easy game for Scions.
After playing the usual Luso player and winning our set, another player asked if they could borrow the deck to play a game or two, just to try it out and see what they could do against the matchup.
Burst Luck was on my side, as a prominent early play saw them drop in Wind/Fire Zidane to strip away a couple of my backups and deal me some damage, which hit an Odin to take out the Zidane. They had been banking on me having to burn some number of resources to take Zidane off the field, stripping my hand and leaving me relatively easy pickings.
But, again. Burst Luck.
Games vs Mono-Earth
Having not seen Mono-Earth in a little bit, but knowing this deck is quite a bit for me, I tried to make sure I didn't overextend so that I could regularly have some removal available for dealing with the powerhouse Forwards that this deck can quickly drop in.
Ultimately, I did lose the set. I took one game, however, managing to hit the removal I needed to keep the worst of their Forwards down. I was also proud of Game 3, as although I did lose that, I was able to scrape together a small defense that kept me alive for a couple of turns longer than I expected. The impressive thing about that was the resource deficit I was working under - I spent several turns trying to build up some backups as I was finally drawing them, while my opponent had a full set of 5 and was holding so many cards in-hand that they had to discard each turn. Despite that, I was able to keep myself alive for a couple of turns, in part because they were worried about hitting my Odins on the damage.
After our set, the Luso player asked to borrow the Mono-Earth deck for a set. A relatively quick set where I lost both of the games we played, but a set nonetheless. While the Luso player was a little more aggressive in their style than the Mono-Earth deck's usual pilot, ultimately it still broke down in much the same way - Mono-Earth pulled together so many resources that it just overwhelmed me.
Games vs Knights
The games I kept the fewest notes on, mostly because the set was pretty short.
Knights did Knights things to me. The main thing that kept the games from going too quickly is that the Knights player is the same one from last Wednesday, another player that's about as new to the game as I am. There were a few play mistakes on their end, but Knights being able to go wide as quickly as they do meant my relatively potent single-target removal wasn't as useful as it could have been, and I haven't added in any particularly decent board wipes to the list (such as Ixion). This in addition to Knights being able to pop my Forwards with relative ease, to keep me away from the "critical mass" that Scions wants to be at for Thancred and Y'shtola's on-entry auto-abilities, meant that things stayed in their favor.
And in one of our games, a Cid Randell coming into play to completely stop my on-entry abilities effectively shut down any hope I had of trying to build a comeback.
Conclusion
I've missed my Scions, to be honest. I do genuinely think that focusing on my Dragoons for the past two weeks to get in as much practice as I could for the LQ on Sunday was the correct choice, don't get me wrong.
And having set the Scions aside to instead bring the Dragoons back out was also, I think, the correct choice. The two decks have a lot of similarities between their game plans, and I do think that playing Dragoons as much as I have has managed to make me at least a little better at playing my current Mono-Lightning incarnation of the Scions list.
But, that said, the similarities between the two lists and the relatively worse performance that I've had with my Scions on the whole versus what I've accomplished playing Dragoons has made me want to make some significant changes to the Scions list, to move it away from its current midrange-tempo plan. Doing so will require making an order for the many cards I'm currently missing, but such is the nature of TCGs.
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