6 people made it out to Locals tonight, so we had a "proper" event fire off.
In honor of the upcoming Winter Cup, which I plan to participate in as it is happening at this very store, I decided to start getting some more practice in with my Dragoons, so that was the deck I played for all three rounds today.
Round 1 vs Ice/Lightning Cat VIII - Loss
To start with, I didn't see an Alus until entirely too late into the game for it to be helpful. When I did see it, I made the same mistake I've made several times in the past, laser-focusing on dropping the Prince into play, running myself out of resources to do so.
Meanwhile, the Cat VIII player was basically exploding all over the field, and I was plainly unable to keep up, especially after the resource burn to play the Alus.
The true nail in my coffin was a Quistis that dull and froze my board not once, but because I broke her enabling recursion with a Seifer, but twice. This neutered me, given the resource denial from keeping my backups out of reach.
Round 2 vs Mono-Ice - Win
I never saw an Alus at all this game.
But I also didn't need him. I played two backups on turn 1, and tried to maintain reasonable resources in hand so I didn't end up in "top-deck" mode. Unfortunately for me, Mono-Ice Discard Shenanigans ended up stripping my hand. I played the rest of the game fairly slowly and conservatively, almost trying to play like a control deck, and I was eventually able to fight around their collection of dulls, freezes, and overall board state to take the victory.
Round 3 vs Dark/Lightning - Loss
This game wound up quite unfortunate for me. At almost every turn, they had access to some dull effect or another to keep my blockers - and multiple times, my attackers - out of commission at crucial moments.
I did see Alus on turn 2 or 3, early enough that it was worth running my hand out of resources to drop the Prince into play, given the long-term "repayment" of the extra card draw off of him each turn from his trigger.
Unfortunately, them keeping my blocks and attacks out of commission through dulling and outright removing them meant that I wasn't able to accomplish as much as I would like, and they were able to maintain control over the game, taking the win over me.
Friendly Match vs Dark/Lightning
After we finished Round 3, myself and the Dark/Lightning player decided to "play out" as if it were a Best of 3 game.
And somewhat annoyingly, I wound up taking both games of this friendly match. I was better able to deal with their removal and dulling effects, thanks in part to being able to use a lot of the 4-cost Freya's Dragon's Crest specials to remove the Class Zero Cadets that were used for dulling my field down in the game that was important for tonight's Locals.
Conclusion
Boy howdy, this was the worst I think I've done with my Dragoons in absolute ages.
Fortunately there's still quite some time 'til the Winter Cup, so I have time to get more practice back in with the Dragoons to get back to where I feel like I know what I'm doing in a variety of different situations.
And as a small note, I plan to play Dragoons primarily because of Winter Cup being a team event, and the Dragoons have nearly no overlap with any other deck in the format. While I would still rather focus on Scions for competitive play, Dragoons work out well in a team environment as a strong deck in their own right, as well as being one where I need to make nearly no changes to the main deck itself - only a few LB cards run the risk of competing with my teammates.
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