Greetings, card game adventurers! Welcome back to Lv.1 Onion Knight: the Final Fantasy TCG blog run by the Onion Knight who studied creative writing at Onion University while everyone else in my class was learning how to become Ninjas and Sages. I think we all know which of us made the right choice there.
Well would you look at that? It's spoiler season yet again! I'd like to think that this one is extra special for me though, since this March will mark the fourth year since I started writing this blog. So happy anniversary to me I guess! As always, major thanks to the FFTCG community team for letting me do one of these!
Funnily enough, despite the fact that I've been doing community spoilers since Opus VI, I've never actually gotten to spoil an Onion Knight card before now. That's pretty weird right? It's not as though there are a lot of other Onion Knight-themed FFTCG players out there. If there were I would know, because there can only ever be one.
In any case, the head honchos at Square Enix have finally deemed me worthy enough to spoil a card bearing my namesake. So as the deputy chairman of the Star Onion Brigade (or S.O.B. for short), I'm very happy to welcome a new Onion Knight to Emissaries of Light!
Onion Knight here has an auto-ability that would seem much more at home on a Water card instead of a Fire card. Generally, these sorts of hand-filtering effects are a good way to dig further into your deck to grab a card you need in exchange for a card in your hand that you don't. However this Onion Knight is a little unusual in that the order of how these effects usually go is reversed - you have to discard before you draw. In fact, of all the cards with filter effects, only Pupu has the order as discard/draw rather than the other way around. Strangely, there is actually a subtle but important distinction between the two effect orders.
Discarding first can appear as more of a disadvantage than drawing first, since you'll have less options to filter your hand with, and will be stuck with whatever you draw into. However, the important thing to know about this is that the draw effect is not dependent on the discard effect happening first. Since the two actions are part of the same effect, if you draw two cards first, then you will always have two cards to discard in the end. However if you play Onion Knight with no other cards in your hand to discard, you will just straight up draw 2 cards. So with this order of operations, you can play a bit more aggressively and then finish off with Onion Knight to end your turn with 2 cards in your hand.
Of course, you could also argue that all this does is encourage people to play inefficiently. It's unlikely that after a turn where you play a lot of cards to the field, you'll have the CP to pay for Onion Knight solely from Backups. If you're pitching two cards from hand to play Onion Knight to try and get the "free draw", then you've ultimately achieved the same thing you would have if you just discarded the cards with his effect. However, there's still a few more tricks that this Onion Knight has up his Sagely sleeve.
It looks like this card's optimal use would be in a deck dedicated to Onion Knight. Go figure! The old Light Onion Knight is still valuable for being a cheap Haste Forward that you can get some early aggression in with. But now you can also use his action ability to "exchange" himself with the new Fire Onion Knight, and immediately filter the Light card into your Break Zone rather than sitting dead in your hand.
Of course, you may not even want to play it with an empty hand, since discarding two Onion Knights is actually a quick way to get your Break Zone prepped to use the Multi-Element Onion Knight's effect. I actually did play an Onion Knight/Ninja deck back in Opus XIII, and the ability deal three Forwards 9K damage by removing three OK's in your Break Zone from the game was extremely powerful. But to get the effect off reliably you need to stuff your deck with a lot of Onion Knights, and I often felt like the Lightning Sage and Meteor Onion Knight would clog up my hand. The new Onion Knight handily solves this problem, and being a Fire element card helps streamline Onion Knight decks to being dual-color rather than needing to splash Lightning in there too.
His second job also lets him benefit from the plethora of Warrior of Light support in the FFTCG. All the easy searching and buffing that WoL's have aside, the new Onion Knight also becomes much more efficient to play with cards like Faris and Aegis. You typically want to use Faris's cost-reduction effect to quickly build a large board of Forwards, so playing Onion Knight with an empty hand off two Backups seems like a much more feasible ask.
ONION NINJA EDIT:
But yes, since all of the new Black Waltz cards deal 4000 damage to something when they're discarded by an effect, running them with Onion Knight seems like a good idea. Now, the filter effect can become an 8k nuke if two of these are pitches. Really hope to see more discard shenanigans like this in Black Mage tribal decks!
All around, not too shabby! Funnily enough I put Onion Knight on the board before I even knew what my spoiler for this set would be, so it's not like I put it there with any pre-existing knowledge. I may be a scoundrel but I do like to have some degree of integrity here. I have to say my favorite reveal so far has been Black Waltz 1. This might seem like a pretty wild guess to get right, but I ended up putting that on the board since:
- The new Vivi specifically says to choose one Job Black Mage from the Break Zone. If it were also Name Black Mage, that would give him a lot more targets, but as a job, Black mage is pretty rare. Shantotto is a Mage and Lulu is a Guardian, so that really only leaves Palom, Robel Akbel, and the Black Watlzes.
- The reason that Black Waltz 1 hasn't been in the game yet (or in Chapters for that matter) is because there just aren't any pre-existing art resources that would be suitable for a card. The only art of him is concept sketches, and he's not in any CG cutscenes like Black Waltz 3 is.
- Rubi Asami was listed as doing new artwork this set for Final Fantasy IX.
