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,