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[kunicfftcg-blog]

Tournament Report - A Noobs First 1st tournament

Hello my dear non-existent readers, I am Kunic and I literally just started playing Final Fantasy TCG not 8 days ago. Twirls mustache

Before I get on with everything that’s happened in this slightly-elongated past week, let’s get to my backstory! 

...

Okay, okay, I won’t go into too many details; only the relevant stuff will be covered. In short, this is the first physical TCG I’ve played in over 11 years. The last TCG I played was Yu-Gi-Oh!, which I played for about 5 years from 2002-2007. I wasn’t anything huge in the scene, but I did stand out a bit (not to stroke my own ego or anything). 

The area I lived in was the heart of where some of the Metagame.com writers lived (remember that awesome site?), and, taking inspiration, I began to write for TCGPlayer.com. Coinciding with this, I also moderated their Yu-Gi-Oh! forum. Therefore, to say I was heavily ingrained in a subsection of the NA Yu-Gi-Oh! scene would be an understatement. However, as life went on, I had to make some choices that drove me away from the game.

As a last hurrah, after 7 months of not playing the game, I entered into a 2007 Shonen Jump Championship that happened in my city, where I took 23rd out of close to 230 entrants, with my only 2 losses happening to top-8 finalists. This is my highest Yu-Gi-Oh! accomplishment, and I’d say that it’s a damned fine way of ending things, wouldn’t you?

This is a picture from Metagame.com that shows the top table going into Round 9 of the event. Can you spot me?

Anyhow, backstory complete, let’s move on! 

So after a long hiatus, I was itching to get back into a card game. Yu-Gi-Oh! has changed way to much, and not for my liking, so that was out of the question. Ultimately my friend messaged me on Discord about how he’s wanting to try out Final Fantasy TCG. So I read the rules 8 days ago, and off to the races we went!

My local card shop hosts tournaments every other weekend, so I had just a week to prepare for my first event, and then I’d need to wait 2 weeks for the next. I decided that I wanted to build a cheap deck with locally sourced cards first, and then I’d splurge on the harder-to-find cards online during the 2 weeks of downtime I’ll have. To achieve this, I purchased a few Opus IV boosters, as well as all 3 Opus V starters (my local card shop was running a weekly special, putting them all at $8.99). This helped to pad out my core cards (Evoker’s and such). 

During my research, I discovered the lovely midgar.blog, where I took immense inspiration for a mono wind deck. I pieced together a near carbon copy, sans a few of the harder to get cards (lookin’ at you, Izana), and with just $17 spent, I was ready for the event.

My first FFTCG Tournament

We had a turn-out of 9 total people. Well, it was 8, and then 9. You see, standings were posted, my opponent and I sat down to play, and then... Nevermind, we have a 9th person, new standings will be posted! So round 1 ended up being a BYE for me. I was a little disheartened by this, but by now a few players knew I was brand-spankin’ new to the game, so they let me hover over and watch their games to learn.

1-0

One of the players I was watching wrapped up his game in about 10 minutes, and wanted to have a match with me to teach me. Thanks dude with the rainbow watchband (I’m horrible with names)! He was going to use his tournament deck, which was a Chocobo’s deck, but then I mentioned it’d be a near mirror match-up, so he swapped it out for a mono-lightning deck (I think). I ended up winning this (yay!), but I knew it was because he didn’t get the removal he needed.

Standings for round 2 were posted and I was up against a Scion’s deck! Specifically it was Earth/Lighting. Thing’s started out nicely for me, but then they turned sour real fast. You see, this deck has 1 major weakness, and that’s removal. It doesn’t matter the type of removal, the opponent just needs it and I can’t come back. Well, he had Al-Cid. The good Al-Cid. Yeah I was dead by turn 3. I scored two points of damage out of spite and conceded as I just couldn’t come back from that.

But hey, at least some hot Yuffie-on-Yuffie action happened this game. That’s always a plus, right?

1-1

The third round was a bit more interesting as I was up against Mono Ice. You know, discards and crap. Pretty fast he had 2 Gesper’s and 2 Thaumaturge. Yeah that was brutal. But you know what he didn’t have? Removal. Considering virtually every card in my deck is a 1 or 2, I just resorted to dumping my hand every turn. Yeah that buffed Thaumaturge, but he couldn’t risk attacking with them due to the size of my board. So I just bide my time with Black Chocobo and waited until I drew Shemhazai, the Whisperer. Boom, victory over the ice threat!

2-1

The fourth and final round before the semi and grand-finals. I was placed in top 4 at the time and, as a result of how my local store does things, was given an non-foil Promo Exdeath. Neat!

Alright, so I was originally going to by up against rainbow wristband guy again, but the system accidentally gave someone a BYE two times in a row, so they had to redo the listings. Rainbow wristband guy begrudgingly got it, sorry dude. 

Anyhow, my final opponent... I can’t really recall his deck. He really only played 3 cards against me: 

Chaos

Kam’lanaut

Zodiark, Keeper of Precepts 

The Zodiark was both a huge issue, and why I ultimately won this game. You see, due to these big plays (all happening within the first 3-4 turns), he didn’t have much else in terms of board presence. He had a 2 drop that blocked me early early on, but I was able to deal with it. Afterwards I could easily direct attack past the Kam’lanaut... until he dropped the Zodiark. This wiped out 4 of my forwards, which immediately brought him down to just 2 life, but I lacked a board, and only had 1 card in hand. Thankfully that card was my faithful Black Chocobo, and I drew into 2 more forwards, including Yuffie. This lead to a secured victory on my next turn.

3-1

Boy this is getting long. But I got top 4!

At this point it was time for semi-finals. Now, my shop does something cool here. First place gets 8 boosters and 2 promo cards, second gets 6 boosts and 1 promo card, and 3rd/4th gets 3 boosters. However, instead of playing, we could split all the boosters evenly (5-each), and the top 2 seeded players get their respective promo card prizes. We opted for the latter. So a $5 entry got my a Promo Exdeath, and 5 boosters of my choice (per the suggestions of everyone around me, I went with Opus VI).

And that’s it for the tournament! I got 3rd place, which is about 6 places higher than I expected to be. Pretty proud of that.’

Post tournament shenanigans

At this point, my friend had showed up and mentioned how the shop still had 3 of the Opus VI Pre Release Kits on hand for $35 each... Yeah I was gonna get me one of those!

I didn’t get too much from all the boosters, mostly just a few foil Hero and Rare cards, but man it was all worth it for that sexy foil Guy and the Gullwing card back.

Yeah, this was a ton of fun. For having not played a physical TCG in over a decade, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. 

Sorry for such a long post, but I just had to get all of my excitement out!