After sitting out Gundam TCG yesterday - between Daylight Savings, my general exhaustion, and a little bit of concern over the life issues that kept me away from Commander on Friday night, I wanted the extra bit of sleep - I was excited to head out for Final Fantasy TCG tonight for a couple of reasons.
One, I haven't really slung any cardboard this week. While I did overhaul my Gym Leader Challenge deck for Pokémon TCG, I didn't actually get to play with it after doing so. And two, I haven't really gotten any opportunity to test my Crystals deck ever since I shifted it into a Mono-Fire list.
So, tonight in order to give the deck some test runs, I played my Mono-Fire Crystals.
I will say, going into this, I knew full well that this list was largely just a bad version of a typical Mono-Fire deck, so my expectations were deeply tempered from the word "go".
There were only four of us tonight, so we played a relatively quick round-robin style tournament. My notes may be somewhat limited since I didn't really jot much of anything down.
Round 1 vs Water-Lightning Monsters - Loss
My opponent's first time playing the Water-Lightning version of the Monsters list, and with them getting a "last hurrah" in with the Relm from Opus XI that was recently announced to be receiving a ban at the end of the month when the next set - Dreamlike Oceans - is released.
Anyway. The long and short of this game was that I had a devil of a time trying to generate Crystals. I also found myself fairly low on cards-in-hand for much of the game, so my resources all around were a bit short. I did manage to get a Zidane in play early, which let me see that my opponent had access to a Relm, a Merlwyb, and two copies of Witch of the Fens.
In retrospect, I should probably have trimmed out the Witches, rather than getting caught up on the Relm and the searcher. Not that much use was really gotten out of the Witches either, but the threat of their removal ability should have scared me more than the Relm's ability to search out Monsters. At the time, they had no other Monsters in hand, so without Relm to grab any, they were stuck trying to draw them instead, but it ultimately did end in their favor. Like I said, Witch didn't get much done, but she was able to do enough. The Monsters took it over me in the end.
Round 2 vs Warriors of the Crystal - Loss
This was weird for me. I had a fair amount of Crystal generation, I had a decent amount of payoff, I even had a reasonable number of cards-in-hand for most of the game.
But when my turn 1 saw me hard-cast my 8-cost Bartz because the rest of my hand was that rough, the game was bound to take a turn for the interesting.
We had what felt like a solid back-and-forth, with the two of us doing a good job at keeping each other in check for a long while. I had a fairly sizeable lead for a while, oddly off the backs of my LB Ardyn and LB Vincent giving me an attacker and two decent blockers, but they were eventually able to stabilize and turn the game around while I was trying to get a few more decent Forwards I could play.
Round 3 vs Mono-Fire "Rainbow" Crystals - Win
Another sort of weird game, but one that my opponent thinks I effectively locked in on turn 2 or 3 when I hit their Guy with Amat, completely destabilizing their resources and game plan, since they didn't have a proper backup in mind.
In the end, I won the war of attrition on resources despite a few significant misplays - including that I forgot the Backup Selphie has the ability to turn herself into a not-insignificant buff for a Forward, which wrecked a few of my removal attempts.
While we waited on our other two opponents to finish up, we played another quick friendly.
I lost that one, because my opponent sort of had my number, and properly played around my Amats that time.
Conclusion
I really want to like this Mono-Fire list. It has a few consistency issues, though, where I either wind up with plenty of Crystal generation but nothing to spend it on, plenty of payoffs but no generation, or I have both of those but my normal resources are lacking.
My opponent from the final round brought up that in their opinion, that's sort of the biggest weakness of trying to do a mono-color Crystal list. There's no one element that really has enough generation and enough payoff to make a Crystal deck tick properly.
I did ask them their opinion of my list, since I knew I was dealing with those above-mentioned consistency issues, and their opinion was, well, basically what I said near the start of this: It's just a less efficient version of the "real" Mono-Fire decks. It does almost everything that Mono-Fire normally wants to do, it just took me more resources to do it.
So despite the vibe that it's a bad Mono-Fire list and an inconsistent Crystal list, I still want to try to make the deck work out, even if not as a serious Competitive contender. I have reasonably high faith in some of the new tools that will be coming out in Dreamlike Oceans, although I seem to be the minority of my local playgroup in that regard.
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