Another Monday, another FFTCG night, and possibly - probably? - the last one before the Local Championship Qualifier on the 7th.
Wanting to dust them off for the first time in quite a number of months - getting some last-minute practice before I likely play them at the LCQ - I pulled my Dragoons off of the shelf.
With a rather astounding ten (10!) players tonight, we had a solid 4 Rounds of play.
Round 1 vs Cost 1 Bartz - Win 7-4
I won the roll, went first, and when I didn't see an Alus in my opening hand, I took the mulligan. Unfortunately, I didn't see one in my second hand either, nor off the draw.
Thank goodness that 2-drop Aranea flipped the Prince over and put him in my hand, then. Dumping my hand, I played Alus, and ended the turn with one card.
My opponent went all-in on an aggressive opening turn, dropping Bartz, the matching Boko, and a 1-drop Reks. Bartz and Boko partied up and grabbed an Ultros, tucking the Aranea away, leaving me wide open to three points of damage. My turn came around and I put a 6-drop Aranea in play to break the bird, and left her up to serve as an attack deterrent.
LB Noctis got my opponent's Boko back, who was then dropped back into play to party up with Bartz, grabbing a 1-drop Ice-element Lightning. Aranea took Bartz down on the block, but Lightning - who was too large to stop with Aranea - swung in for Damage 4.
The extra draws off of Alus came in rather clutch for me, as in conjunction with the backup line I'd been building up, I was able to play the 5-drop power loss Dragoon to remove the Lightning, along with the 2-drop Dragoon that scales up its power for each other Dragoon in play. This gave me a rather solid defensive line that my opponent wasn't able to get around. When they dropped Kelger and used that to break Aranea, I was able to use LB Kain more or less in her place to give myself another blocker.
LB Gilgamesh removing two Bartz from their Break Zone, and the third eventually getting sent to damage once I cleared away portions of their board, basically spelled the end of the game, and I finished sweeping them away.
Round 2 vs Fire-Wind Crystals - Loss 4-7
I lost the roll, went second, saw the Alus off of a Lunafreya - which also tucked a second Alus, meaning I knew I was even less likely to whiff over the course of the game.
Unfortunately, my opponent had an early Clive, along with a host of backups, and I was worried about feeding a potential blocker to Ifrit, which lead to me playing far more conservatively than I think I otherwise would've been trying - allowing them to rack up a fair bit of early damage and putting me in a position where I felt behind for most of the game.
I did finally get a turn where a few of my single-target removal Dragoons were able to hit the field and take out what was at the time their whole board, alongside LB Cloud. Speaking with my opponent after the game, they said the Cloud was honestly probably a bit of an overextension on my end, and that if the roles were reversed, that's probably the only part that they wouldn't have done.
Part of that was that I was sitting on pretty low backups for most of the game, so spending the resources to drop the Cloud meant I was then behind on resources despite the extra draws off of Alus. Matters were made worse when I had to crack my backups to get Forwards back from my Break Zone to have plays, which just sort of snowballed the resource issue and let them ultimately take over handily thanks to their superior resources, between a full suite of backups and quite a lot of card draw off of Clive and the new Marche from Dreamlike Oceans both letting them draw extra cards on damage.
A Cyan wiping my board after my own board wipe turn was what really drove that resource problem home, and lead to the snowballing losses.
Round 3 vs Earth-Lightning Starter Deck 2025 - Win 7-0
This was... a little mean, I'm not going to lie.
This was effectively a brand new player. They had, by their own admission, gotten all of about two or three games before today, with an unofficial third client, against some of their friends who are similarly new to the game. This made our game in Round 3 all of about their fifth game of FFTCG.
And I was playing Dragoons.
I did my best to help teach them throughout the game, tried to coach them a bit on some of their plays, tried my best to explain the reasoning behind some of those decisions, things like why they really wouldn't want to, for instance, play the Starter Deck's "highlight" card, the 3-drop Cloud, onto a board where the only other Forward they had was the 1-drop Luso from the Starter Deck, who had also only just been played and couldn't make use of Cloud's on-entry auto ability providing a buff and Brave.
Despite that, though, unless I had completely sandbagged, Dragoons were just too strong for the new player to handle, especially with the precon.
Still, they seemed appreciative after the fact, so... mission accomplished, I hope.
Round 4 vs Dragoons - Loss 7-4
Dragoon Mirror!
They won the roll, went first, we both had turn 1 Alus, and I had a second backup turn 1 as well.
Unfortunately, those were the only two backups I saw for quite some time, meanwhile my opponent built up 4 or 5 backups over the first couple of turns. So while I got the first point of damage in, they had the resource advantage over the long-term, which is what ultimately gave them the edge over me.
Not helping matters was that my first opening hand had two of the 3-drop Freya and none of my Alus, so I had to mulligan away those two. The third copy of that Freya was deep in the deck, so I never saw the board wipe that I desperately needed to clear away their well-established board position.
Ah well, it happens. I can't even be mad, I love playing the mirror match.
Conclusion
Alright, Dragoons. I think I forgive you after how poorly you ran for me back at Winter Cup.
The Dragoons are probably the list I'm going to take with me for Sunday's LCQ. I already have a copy of the deck list printed, they're genuinely a solid call into the current metagame that we've been seeing at Materia Cups and other LCQs, and I do still have a fair bit of practice with playing them from how much I was using them near the end of the previous season. Today was good for shaking off the rust since I haven't pulled them from the shelf in months, but I think that's about the best prep I can really hope for right now.
