Hello everyone, and welcome to Lv.1 Onion Knight: The Final Fantasy TCG blog that still can't catch a break even with randomly assigned decks.
We interrupt your regularly scheduled content to discuss something I almost never talk about on this blog: a tournament.
But not just any tournament mind you - one that me and my crack team of shallots here at Onion Knight headquarters have been working on setting up for awhile now. As you may or may not know, the fine folks of the FFTCG NYC crew really love coming up with alternative casual game modes like we did with the Twin Party System back in 2019. Well this time around, we came up with a wacky new style of tournament that combines out-of-the-box deck building, testing your adaptability piloting decks, and a little bit of chaos to boot: The Battle Factory!
I'll have my usual set review and raffle up by the end of the month (TWO articles in one month?? Shocking I know!), but I'm actually really proud of the work that these lovable knuckleheads did to create this game mode, and thought other people might be interested in trying it out for themselves. It's quite fun, even though I got utterly destroyed in our run of it.
So with out further ado, let's talk about the FFTCG Battle Factory!
What is the FFTCG Battle Factory?
Have you ever looked at a card and thought, "man, I would love to try building around this card, but I don't think it would ever work in the current meta"? Are you sick of seeing the same decks run at tournaments? Looking for a way to spice up your locals? Then the Battle Factory format may be just what you're looking for! The goal of a Battle Factory tournament is simple: Build the zaniest, spiciest decks you can, then randomly assign them to players and watch the sparks fly. Win and have the choice of stealing your opponent's deck for your own. Lose and get another spin at the roulette of random decks and see what fate has in store for you next round.
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| It's like this, but actually fun. |
The main idea for the Battle Factory actually came from the Pokemon games rather than anything from Final Fantasy. Specifically, its a reference to the facility sharing the same name in the Battle Frontier found in the third and fourth generation Pokemon games. For the unfamiliar, in this facility players are given teams of random Pokemon to use, with the ability to select a new one from their opponent's team upon victory.
I wanted to do something similar to this in the FFTCG because we have some truly mad-genius level deck builders in our group who really enjoy experimenting with different cards and discovering combos that might get overlooked in standard constructed play. Plus, playing with random decks is a fun way to test your skills and see how well you can figure out how to master a completely unfamiliar deck.
I also have no idea if there's an equivalent to this in another card game at the moment, so if somebody in the comments is like "Uh actually that's just the Commander Hoedown format from Magic" or whatever, just know that I was blissfully unaware of that when we were workshopping this idea. I'm also pretty sure I could have named this format something more appropriate to the Final Fantasy series, like "Crystal Conundrum" or something, but hey, I'm an overworked Onion Knight here, so Battle Factory. There you go.
There are two different ways you can run a Battle Factory tournament depending on how you want the decks to be distributed upon the conclusion of a match:
Format A: The winner of the match can choose to swap decks with the opponent, or stay with their own. Regardless of what the winner of the match chooses, the loser can choose to randomly swap their deck with one of the remaining decks from the pool. This format prevents losing players from getting stuck with a deck that really doesn't work for them for the whole tournament.
Format B: The winner of the match is forced to randomly swap their deck with one of the remaining decks from the pool. This prevents one deck from sweeping the tournament and really puts a player's ability to pivot to different deck styles to the test. You can only win this format by consistently winning with new decks.
Regardless of the format, you're welcome to use either Swiss or Round Robin for round pairings.
Set Up
So how can you go about setting up your own Battle Factory tournament? Well the first thing you're going to need is decks, and lots of them! Try and have at least 4 extra decks than there are players - we ran an 8-person tournament and had 13 decks in the pool.
We also chose to avoid including popular meta decks for a number of reasons. First and foremost is our group's personal preference to building wacky jank, and because we wanted to really see how well our players could handle totally unfamiliar decks with interesting win conditions. We wanted our focus for this tournament to be cards that really don't see a lot of play in recent sets, either due to power creep, or ones that never quite caught on with players, so stuff like Blitz Ace Tidus, Rapid Fire Bartz, and Job: Girl Chelinka were all fair game.
But another reason is that the meta naturally gravitates towards maybe a maximum of three or four high performing decks. We wanted to avoid including anything that was a bit too overpowered for deck diversity and balance purposes, as well as to prevent one player from getting lucky pulling an S-Tier deck and steamrolling the whole tournament.
We did do a bit of playtesting beforehand to ensure that all the decks we built felt like they were on an even playing field. I also want to state that the goal of this game mode is not to purposely try and screw your opponents over by making purposely bad decks, so don't be that guy! The goal of this is to make something fun and interesting, and besides - you never know if you'll wind up getting the deck you built. Otherwise, you're welcome to use whatever kinds of decks you want in this chaotic, competitive potluck!
Once you've got your deck pool settled, have some way of marking the decks with a number/symbol/etc. We just so happened to have enough decks where we could put a playing card the top of each deck box. Then we took another set of cards with matching number from the playing card deck, shuffled them together, and had each player randomly select one. Once these were given out, the players took the deck that matched the number on our cards. I'm sure that there's a more technical way of doing this - especially if you have an extremely large group - but it was also gave me an excuse to bust out my deck of Final Fantasy playing cards for MAXIMUM BRAND SYNERGY!
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| In case you're wondering, there's no special reason the 7 is missing from here. I just can't count. |
Allow everyone some time to look through their decks and get a proper feel for it. If you see another player has gotten a deck you built, you're welcome to explain any strategies or combos you intended for the deck to pull off. For example, the person who built the deck I got during the tournament is a Machiavellian psychopath who built a Rube Goldberg machine style deck revolving around cheating out powerful cards with Red XIII and Hojo. Since I don't have that level of big brain energy, I uh... did quite poorly with it. By the end of my first match though, I had effectively figured out optimal opening hands for the deck, techs I could pull off with it, and most importantly, what to do with the Feral Chaos that was in there, which was a bizarrely rewarding experience.
Once a match is over, any player who is receiving a new deck from the pool must use the same method you used to distribute decks at the start of the tournament. After a player receives a new deck, place the one they're giving up back into the pool. Otherwise, matches are conducted as they would be in any other tournament.
Is this type of tournament silly and convoluted? Absolutely. Is it also incredibly fun and dynamic? Hell yes. With a bit of creativity and imagination, you can build decks that might not perform well in a standard tournament, but can pull off some explosive, stylish wins here. Let's take a look at the top cut for our tournament so you'll get a better idea of what I'm talking about.
1st place: What Ever Happened to Duelhorns?
Created by Sean, AKA, "The Blue Mage"
Rydia and Auron are there to support Alys by searching and protecting her. The lightning part of the deck is to set up quicker with cards like Luso, and allow for even faster usage of Alys. Finally, Kefka is another great deterrent for aggressive decks, playing for free against large boards and then punishing them with a Raiden or Leviathan played with his effect."
🔰 Just like Sean said, this deck was incredibly annoying to go up against - especially as somebody who played a turn one Nael in a Forward-heavy deck and then couldn't attack with her since I had no Backups with Night Dancer on the field. The way that the Duelhorn package shuts off early aggression and slows down decks, I would be curious to see if there were any way of using them as a counterplay to the Final Fantasy XIII deck that's currently rampaging the meta. Can't get those three attacks off if everything comes in dull after all.
2nd Place: LÉ CROIX SUPRÊME
Created by Daniel, AKA "The Producer"
Hecatonchier can help stall out in the beginning of a duel and Ramuh can be a boon in some situations. Syldra can only really be played with Shantotto or Cait Sith but if you have them set up early you can grab 2 different Exdeaths!!! All in all, the deck is fun and meant to be so its super easy to set up and Grand Cross. Don't be afraid of losing your board as you're playing a more defensive deck with a lot of recursion and ways to grab Exdeath. 7 CP Lightning is kinda sick with Grand Cross."
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the Opus III Exdeath in the deck Daniel made was in French, hence the title.
3rd Place: Are We the Baddies?
Created by Rob, AKA "Daddy Warbucks"
"First and foremost in building this deck I wanted to accomplish a few things:
1. I wanted to build an intuitive deck that anyone can pick up and play.
2. In the theme of our Battle Factory I wanted to build a deck that highlighted cards that see little to no tournament play.
3. I really wanted to build a deck around the Opus 14 Earth Cloud.
In that regard I want to talk about 2 cards that I knew for sure I wanted to be in this deck.
I think since this Cloud was spoiled in the lead up to Opus 14, the community's overall impressions of him have swing drastically like a pendulum. I've seen takes where he could be considered "meta defining" and much like in the same vein of Neo Exdeath where every deck must have some sort of answer to Cloud or else he decimates both your board and/or your hand size. And I have also seen takes where the opportunity cost of building a deck around Cloud is too high, too costly, the game has too many answers for him, and the best decks can deal with him naturally. I think both of these takes are accurate but I also figured in the right scenarios and in the right format this Cloud can truly become a nightmare to deal with.
The other card I knew I wanted to add was Carbuncle from Opus 14 as well. It's cheap, it applies to your entire board, it can potentially replace itself, it's category 7 so it can be used to pay for Cloud's action ability, AND its on a burst.
With that out of the way, the deck just naturally built itself. I wanted my Backup line to be entirely Earth and I wanted to put as many playable category 7 cards I could find into the deck with some obvious restrictions. Because the condition of Cloud's ability specifies that it can be payed for with category 7 cards, I was also comfortable with playing a higher volume of light and dark cards. The lightning splash felt natural, especially after I remembered that Class Tenth Moogle could also color fix for lightning. I didn't want to play Cu Sith simply because it was such a ubiquitous Earth card so I had to find some other ways of recursion for my key cards. Billy Bob was an easy add in that regard as well as Marlene with both being category 7. Mont Leonis I thought could be a spicy one of as he will usually be fairly costed and could perhaps be a sweet top deck in those situations where you need to rebuild your board. I also consider Matoya a strong add as she has multiple modes for multiple situations. The ability to recur, RFG your opponent's break zone, or pressing the emergency red button when the board gets too hot made her feel very relevant. So much so that if I had another opportunity to make changes to this deck, she would be a cut simply to lower this deck's power level.
On that note I wanted to talk about the changes I would actually like to make to this deck if given an opportunity. The Opus 16 Aerith paired with Opus 11 Tifa created some borderline unfair and oppressive board states that other decks in our format weren't equipped to deal with.
Aerith would either go down to 1 or be cut entirely and replaced with light Aerith as well as perhaps bumping up our dark Sephiroth to 3. I would've also liked to have cut Cactuar entirely and bump Kujata up to 2 simply because Cactuar synergized too well with the deck. Taking a point of damage was very relevant at times as it could potentially make Tifa's damage 3 field ability live and could also potentially allow for Sephiroth to be cast if you were off by 1 on the damage threshold. And we've already talked about why Matoya would be cut here.
All in all I'm very happy about how this deck performed, especially because it was piloted by a newer player by the name of Ty and she was able to take 3rd place with the deck. Ty did need a game to get a feel for how the deck runs but she performed admirably and well above expectations. Congrats to all!"
🔰 Damn, and I thought I could write a lot of words about cards, but since Rob supplied some super generous prizing out of his own pocket for this tournament - Pre-release kits from Opus XI through XIV, one of which had a full-art Amaterasu in its packs - I didn't want to cut down any of his essay here. Rob really is amazing, kind, and hustles harder than anyone I know to bring new players into our fold, and despite being the most competition savvy and technically minded member of our group, is always down to experiment with some fun decks. I'm incredibly grateful for everything he does for the NYC FFTCG scene and would be lost without him. But also he created a deck called "the Anti-Brian deck" for this tournament that was specifically meant to antagonize me, so also screw him.
4th Place: Lightning/Fire WOFF
Created by Daniel, AKA "The Head of Research & Development"
"This deck is very straightforward. Ideally you want Lann and Spectral Keeper out while you poke away at your opponent. I would have loved to have played the new King behemoth card here, as it would have helped the Lann combo but I had made this list before the new set came out.
Maria is a nice card to give your smaller units power and also letting Rorrik becoming a Forward so he can be played again later after he dies. Hes a great burst as well. All the other cards in the deck are very basic and easy to use, like Noel can come in and either dull to units or give one of yours Haste. Aldore Emperor can also be pretty powerful to use if you get it at the right time."
🔰 Dan really is our resident madman when it comes to deck building, but the one he built here was easy enough to play that one of our newer players with limited experience managed to place fourth with it. That's one of the reasons I enjoyed this tournament so much, aside from the absolute bonkers decks everyone came up with, that is.
All in all, the tournament was incredibly fun and I'd love to set up another one of these again. Congrats to all our winners!
So that's the Battle Factory folks! What do you all think? What decks would you bring if you were holding a tournament like this? Are there any cards that you would want to build a deck around? Personally next time around I want to make an earnest attempt at building around Sin's Giga Graviton Special.
I'll have my set review and raffle up real soon! For now, I'll be here, shouting "LÉ CROIX SUPRÊME!!!" to myself while folding laundry and washing dishes.
Until next time - Keep on grinding,
