Opus V: The Search For Paradise

Hey there everyone! After months of hype and anticipation, Opus V is finally here! This release was a special one for me, not only because it was my first TCG prerelease ever, but also because of all the new FFXI cards introduced in this set. If you’ve read the About Me post, or had the dubious pleasure of speaking to me in person, you’d know XI is kiiiind of my favorite Final Fantasy game. Oh sure, there are lots of other awesome cards in Opus V to be excited about: Orphan, Wol, Zemus … but there’s one card I was most hyped about: Eald'narche.

Look at this smug little ancient monstrosity. Gaze upon him with your undeserving mortal eyes. Know that you cannot destroy the Rise of the Zilart, only delay it until the time is right to open the gates of Paradise.
 
... Actually, I have no idea if this card is all that great in a Meta sense or whatever. All I know is it looks super fun to pull off that special, and he's an XI Legend, so of course I need it.

As soon as I saw this card leaked online, I was already sobbing hysterically into my playmat – even if I had no real comprehension on how to use it most effectively, damn it, I would figure out how if it killed me - and with my luck it probably would. So one prerelease event and an official release later, how did I do with my pulls? Well… let’s get started. 

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The Prerelease

I headed into my semi-local game shop (when you live in the Bronx, every trip into the city is over an hour long commute) with Sean to get our prerelease kits Sunday morning. A modest gathering greeted us inside, everyone already happily cracking open their kits and building decks with the new cards supplemented with a few packs from Opus IV. I got my kit and set to work trying to prep myself for the Simplified Sealed tournament that would be happening later on in the day.
 
Oh sure, I had no delusions of winning – with our group of NYC locals, that honor belonged to Andrew either somebody Asian or somebody with glasses – quite possibly both. That being said, I was still pretty stoked to put something together. Let’s take a look at the contents of the kit itself, shall we?

Even as a new player I get the distinct feeling that somebody at SE reaalllllly likes Lightning judging from the constant deluge of cards and promotional art featuring her in the game so far. I can’t help but feel that they tend to go a bit overboard with her. Like I'm sure it took somebody an incredible amount of restraint just putting Minfilia on the prerelease box cover. ...I think I just alienated half of the people reading this with these comments.

#Notmywaifu

The Scion Card sleeves themselves are pretty nice. I heard some people say that they would have preferred more booster packs in lieu of the sleeves, but honestly, even though I’m not the biggest XIV fan, I really liked getting them. I’m the type of person who likes to invest in TCG accessories: sleeves, deck boxes, playmats and such, and considering that I got into the game because I love Final Fantasy, I wish there were more products like these readily available from SE’s website. Hopefully in the future we’ll get some more stuff like this so I can be better coordinated and not use Pokémon card sleeves for my decks.

But it’s the cards that are the most important right? Well Sean started things off by pulling a foil Zemus because of course he did, and I pulled a Cecil-L, once again proving that I am merely an instrument for the TCG Gods’ Chosen One because that was the card he was most eager to get from this set.

-        

I pulled another foil Lightning of the promo we just got though so... y'know.

     Between the two of us we pulled 3 Legends each from our kits, which is pretty good! We got both Palom and Porom, Yshtola, Zemus, Cecil, and The Emperor, so a pretty good haul all things considered.

Some of my other favorite cards we pulled were a foil Aria and Tellah, both of which appear to be competing to see who can achieve the sexiest boudoir pose…

Tellah's been doing this gig for a lot longer though...

...As well as some of the Final Fantasy Tactics A2 cards. I never ended up playing A2, but I really like the card artwork for these. I kind of want to get the whole set in foil now…

BUT! As we all know, getting a few good cards doesn’t necessarily translate into making a good deck in drafts. I hastily cobbled together a tricolor wind/lightning/earth deck vaguely revolving around using cards like Nanaa Migho, Berserker, Lightning, and Spiceillian to try and rack up quick damage early. So how did I end up doing?

Well, I won two of my matches… one of which was against Sean, and since we both suck at this game so far, I’m not really sure if that counts. The other one I’m pretty sure I won by accident. Otherwise I got pretty soundly curb-stomped by the other players. While Berserker was a cheap, high power threat to get out early, the lack of ability to block wound up as more of a hindrance to me without anything to support it, even with cards like Leyak to reactivate it.
 
A better alternative would have probably been 4 drop Caius, who in particular became the bane of my existence during my matches. Even with the discard effect, a 9k Brave forward that could attack and still block was tough for me to deal with.

Coincidentally this is the same face I made every time I saw this card used against me.

Nanaa Migho is a great card, and one that in the right deck, I’m sure would put in some real work. Unfortunately she found herself in my deck, which is kind of a problem. I couldn’t really find too many opportunities to use her well. Again, this isn’t an assessment of the viability of the card: I’m just pretty bad at drafting.
 
Either way for my first promo release, it was a lot of fun! There was an electric energy in the air with everyone going over new card combos and deck builds, and I ended up meeting a lot of players I hadn’t before, both veteran and newcomers like me. Of course after my matches I wanted nothing more than to buy more packs of Opus V, but I would have to wait until the next Friday for that…

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The Opus V Release

One week later and I was raring and ready to throw fistfuls of cash at Square-Enix for sparkly trading cards. That being said, as an adult I have a bit more responsibilities like paying rent and paying for groceries, and seeing as I had recently lost my job, it would be important to exercise some restraint…

Goddammit

Welp, that whole restraint thing failed spectacularly and I bought a whole box, but on the flip side having a spouse who plays the same TCG as you means that you can at least go halfsies on cards, so it really only cost me 60 dollars. That’s definitely a plus, though on the other hand, it makes it really hard to determine who gets to use the more highly sought after cards if you want to make a deck of an element the other one specializes in. Ah well, you win some, you lose some.
 

So many cards it was almost overwhelming… so many potential outcomes. This must be what it feels like to be a god gazing upon a newly created universe. I had never purchased a whole box of cards before: The only person who I had known to ever do that before was a friend who, in his childhood, had his parents buy him boxes of Yugi-Oh! cards from 7-11 so he could get all the cards Mai Valentine used in the television show.

Considering I could only buy like one pack of cards a month, I lost to him a lot.

Either way I had 36 packs of cards to tear into. As the table started to fill up with discarded wrappers and partially sorted cards, I started to get a bit anxious. 12 packs... 24 packs... and still no Eald’Narche. Oh sure, I had gotten some good cards in my pulls (I would hope that in a full box, you would!) but my heart’s desire continued to evade me. As I went for my last pack, I had come to terms with the fact that I would probably not be using Eald’Narche in a deck any time soon, especially since you need at least more than one to use his S ability. I opened the last pack to find…

 

Well... He's a Zilart...

Kam’lanaut, the younger-yet-lets-tell-everyone-I’m-older-so-nobody-suspects anything brother to Eald’Narche and a major antagonist of the Rise of the Zilart expansion in FFXI.
 
Okay, so it’s not the card that I was hoping for, but still I hadn’t managed to pull this card yet, and I was hoping to get him, so I can't really complain. He's actually a really fantastic card - arguably better than his brother depending on the matchup, but it ain't no Paradise win. In any case, lets take a moment to bask in the reflective glory of what I pulled from the box. 

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Legends

I guess the foil WoL makes up for not pulling Eald... I GUESS...

Heroics

Another FFTA2 Foil down! Just Mira and Luso to go. Now I kinda want all 4 Warriors of Light foil too... 

S-Foils

Pulled a second Papalymo so I can finally trade for the IX S-Foils that have eluded me.

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Lv. 1 Onion Knight: A Tale of Card Games and Depression

It all began with a card, or so the legends say...

Hello there fellow Adventurers, and welcome to Lv.1 Onion Knight, a blog chronicling a new player's journey with the Final Fantasy Trading Card Game. I'm your bearded host with the job that really isn't all that good at anything until you grind up to Lv.90 - I hope that whether you're a newbie like me or you're a veteran who had the good sense to change your job to something more viable like a Sage or a Ninja, you enjoy reading about my adventures with the FFTCG as well as my attempts at... well, let's call it humor. 

Thanks for having my back there, Tidus.

As somebody who - at the time of this posting - has only been playing for about two months, I wanted to write about my experiences with this card game that as of right now, has a very niche but dedicated fan base. In a short amount of time, the FFTCG has managed to get both me and my boyfriend completely and totally hooked. Seeing as how we're huge fans of both the Final Fantasy series and collectible trading card games, it was pretty much a match made in heaven. Now we're constantly leaving the sanctity of our cramped little home to do things like interact with other people and engage in conversation with strangers and all sorts of things no self-respecting shut-in nerd should do, all because of this card game. Who would have thought eh? 

And here I thought student loans were the worst thing that could happen to my bank account...

Now there are already a lot of really awesome websites and channels dedicated to the FFTCG online: Six Sages Gaming, FFDecks, Josephyr Gaming - just a few of the incredible resources available to players that can help improve your deck building and general strategy. But you know what doesn't exist yet? A blog written from the perspective of somebody who doesn't have the slightest idea what the hell they're doing and could easily be beaten by the worst person you know at locals! I gotta say, I'm really surprised nobody has thought of this before, but hey, the sweet succulent fruit of this hitherto untapped market is ripe for the picking, and I'm just the guy for the job.
 
"Okay, that's cool and all random guy on the internet," you say, "but why the hell are you making a blog about a game you're not actually good at?" Alright well I hope you're holding on tight to your Chocobos there kiddies because here's where this fun little joy ride takes a sudden and dramatic turn and shit starts to gets real.
 
About a month before writing this post, I had lost my job of 5 years. It was a job that I absolutely and completely hated; Minimum wage, no room for advancement, and no acknowledgement of extra work I put in on a daily basis that went well above what I was paid to do. All of those things are bad enough, but it was made worse by the fact that I had earned my degree in 2016, and try as I might, all of my efforts to transition to a new career were met with rejection emails and interviews that went nowhere. Hell, I even had a big video game company fly me out to California after months of phone interviews, only to have a change in management lead to a closure of the position. My job became like an abusive relationship in that even though things were bad, I had invested too much of myself personally in it to just up and leave without something better coming along first, especially after getting so close several times. So you can imagine my shock when I was the one who got unceremoniously dumped instead of leaving to a new career job in a blaze of glory.

Or without burning the place down... Thankfully I never learned the Fire spell. 

While getting the axe was probably the push I needed to finally move on, it's not as though the loss of the job didn't hurt: I hadn't been unemployed in the past 9 years. What was I supposed to do now? I had been out of school for almost 2 years and still no luck finding a job. Did I just take another crappy, temporary job that didn't utilize my skills as soon as possible? How long would my savings hold out if I decided to keep looking for something in my career area? All of these things combined led to a pretty heavy slump into depression. Oh sure, losing a job is a legitimate enough reason to be depressed, but a big part of how my depression manifests is isolating myself from other people. It becomes easy to shut everyone out, to stay home and feel crappy and not have to deal with anything.

Am I sounding enough like a Millennial yet?

So why am I bringing up all of this melancholy real life nonsense? Well, the Final Fantasy TCG has quickly become my escape from depression much like the video games of the series had been for me in the past. Twice a week I pack up my decks and my binder and head on down to do drafts or casuals with the local tight-knit group of FFTCG players. I get to talk about my pulls, decks I want to build, strategies I want to try, and all that fun stuff. But my favorite part of my weekly play sessions is not only getting to learn how to be a better player from my matches, but getting to learn about the people who make up the community. Some of them have been playing since Opus I released here - others are still trying to figure out what element of cards they want to play with. A lot of what goes into each person's deck is influenced by their favorite games and characters, and for a little while each week I get to be a part of a passionate community that is eager to share their stories and their connection to the Final Fantasy series. So besides getting to improve my skills at the FFTCG, I wanted to use this blog as my way of getting to engage more with the community outside of the NYC Group. Hell, maybe I'll be able to help out some other new players as well.

It may just be helping someone realize there's somebody out there that's even worse at this game then they are, but that's fine too. 

So that leads us here - to this strange, oddly vulnerable little place on the internet. Who knows what will end up happening here. Maybe by the end of this, I'll wind up being a better player. Maybe I'll always be where I am right now - stuck at level 1. Maybe I'll find myself running a YouTube channel showing off Opus VI spoilers, or maybe I'll reveal myself to actually be Tetsuya Nomura doing an undercover PR stunt to promote the TCG. Who knows? The possibilities are literally ENDLESS.

It was either do this or finish up Kingdom Hearts 3 sooo... 

But it's not the destination, it's the journey that matters. At least that's what people say, right? I'm looking forward to seeing where things go from here, getting to be a part of the FFTCG community, and most of all getting to play more card games along the way. So until the end of this blog's journey I'll be here, trying to make sense of this game and skulking around game shops like some pathetic Charles-Dickensian street urchin shaking his tin cup at passersby in the hopes that somebody puts a Garnet-L in there.
 
Until next time - Keep on grinding,

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