After yesterday's Local Championship Qualifier, I was looking forward to tonight's Locals for two main reasons.
Reason one, the newest set, Blissful Eternity, dropped this past Friday, and I was looking forward to grabbing a booster box. Reason two, ostensibly a little more chill night, being less competitive than the LQ.
I showed up to the shop about an hour and a half early for tonight's locals, got my box and a few other things I was looking to pick up, and cracked the box while I was waiting. I got everything from the box that I needed for modifying my decks - particularly my Dragoons and my Crystals - and made those changes before anybody else had shown up.
My pulls otherwise felt a little lackluster. I got a decent number of Legends, and a Full Art Reprint of Gilgamesh (FFBE), but nothing that felt particularly impressive.
But I digress. When the rest of tonight's players showed up - we only had four in total tonight, fewer than I had been expecting - we shuffled up and got ready to go. We ran it as a round robin since there were only the four of us, so it was a fairly quick night.
Wanting more practice playing the deck, and wanting to test my changes, I played Ice-Wind Crystals tonight.
Round 1 vs Sky Pirates - Lose
Their opening turn saw them dumping all of their resources from hand to get a board full of Forwards. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't able to capitalize on how few resources they had afterwards, and they had time to regroup and make what they did have work well enough for them to hold me at bay while they established a better line of resources, after which they just sort of took the game over too quickly for me to setup against and properly "fight back".
Funnily, the two of us had played a couple of friendly games ahead of the event starting proper, and while they absolutely dominated those two games, with one having had a similar start to the "real" game for locals, this one I was able to hold my own much better.
Round 2 vs Warriors - Win
The first couple turns of the game, I did Crystals Things™ against them. Then they handed out to drop an Ifrit (XVI) and took out my Yazoo.
I proceeded to play a Seymour and just bully them real bad with it for the rest of the game. I broke their Ifrit, kept their Seymour dulled and frozen, and their Lenna Backup was kept much the same. They were forced to discard a lot of cards, and when I dropped a Xezat - the new one from Blissful Eternity - they weren't even able to do anything about Seymour since they had to target the Dawn Warrior with their Kuja. They'd even tried to use a Serjes from the LB to freeze Seymour until I reminded them about Xezat forcing them to target him - I let them walk back that Serjes, I'm not a complete monster, and tonight was just a friendly locals, so I didn't want to punish them too badly given how hard Seymour was already locking them out hard enough.
Round 3 vs "Army of Kain" - Lose
Of the three "real" games I played tonight, this was the one that felt the closest. During our opening turns, I played a few Backups, a Vaan, and a Yuffie, while they got the SOPFFO "Crystal" The Emperor and Warped out the Kain from Dreamlike Oceans. When Kain entered, I used Vaan with his Life of Crime Special to try to wipe the board. They responded by trying to Jump with Kain. I responded to that by popping Kain with Yuffie, who in turn got popped by The Emperor since I was out of Crystals to protect her with.
At that point, we were both just sort of playing "draw-go" for a couple of turns, and they were able to start playing again a little bit sooner than I was. Part of that saw them hit me with a Dark-element Kadaj from Opus XI who has a bevy of strong on-entry auto-abilities and a self-flicker ability to make constant use of those abilities. Kadaj was devastatingly effective, and helped them take a few good points of damage before I was able to get back in their way with Forwards.
After a few more points of damage from my end, they were able to get another Kain, finally, and Warped him out. Between Kadaj and Kain, they had enough bodies and enough removal to successfully get around what blockers I had, and they finished the game out.
Conclusion
Compared to when I played this deck two weeks ago, tonight felt much more rough for me. I didn't have much difficulty generating Crystals, but it felt like I had a difficult time finding ways to spend them effectively.
The Sky Pirates playing more aggressively and not giving me time to get set up very well didn't help matters much, I don't think.
I'm still excited to play the deck more, I do think it's a lot of fun and I want to get better at playing it, but tonight was wild for me with how poorly it felt like it went compared to the last (and so far only other) time I shuffled it up two weeks ago - my game against Warriors aside, that is.
No comments:
Post a Comment