Blooming Onions #2: A Community Deckbuilding Challenge - Onion Knight (III)

Hey there folks, and welcome back to Lv.1 Onion Knight - The Final Fantasy TCG Blog that finally got my hands on those Prishe/Shantotto sleeves. My spirit can finally be put to rest.

I've put it off for awhile, but it's finally time for the second Blooming Onions Challenge! *insert cymbal crash here*. If you've been hankering to test out your deck building skills and make use of cards you might not normally think to otherwise, then this next one will be a fun distraction from all those Mono-Fire-But-Also-Ritz builds that everybody is running these days. Before we get going with this one though, lets take a look at the last challenge winner... 

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Blooming Onions #1 Winning Deck: Maybe Eblan, Probably Golbez by Sean Vandenvlekkert

So in challenging everyone to come up with an L3 deck that made the best possible use of the King and Queen of Eblan cards, most people attempted one of two things: Either to use their status as Category IV Forwards to trigger Opus IX Cecil's buff requirements, or to use their Party Attack ping in damage based builds. The NYC crew piloted some of the online submissions as well as some of their own builds in an 8-man tournament, but the winner created something so absolutely insane that it ended up completely stomping the competition so hard that it was almost laughable.

And that person also happens to be my boyfriend Sean. 

My apologies to whoever's deck I chose to pilot for this tournament. You deserved better. 

So before you end up shouting "rigged", you should know the following things: 

• I was actively critical of his choice to run a deck that was primarily based on RNG and suggested he run something else, proving that sometimes the biggest obstacle to your spouse's success is in fact, you. 
• Sean is usually seated alongside me in the loser's bench at tournaments, so in hindsight his unexpected victory may have ended up being the thing that pushed us into the "bad timeline" we're all currently living through, so sorry about that. 

In all seriousness though, you've probably never seen the level of insanely dramatic "Heart of the Cards" plays than with this deck using Golbez (9-087H) - who I would also consider an underplayed card.

I watched him play a Feolthanos from the top of his deck on turn 3 with only one backup and completely shut down a Fire/Lightning XIV build. I watched him use Golbez's Double Meteor S-ability three times in one game, one of which was using the back-to-back discard effect to blow up two Forwards. How is that possible you ask? Because he flipped a Raegan off the top and recurred one of the Golbez's from the Break Zone for it. The deck was so stacked with either expensive cards with powerful entry effects for absurd value or cards that created such an oppressive board state that it became almost impossible to get around.

Lets take a look at some of the combos that made this deck work (besides the obvious one of getting 2 Forwards on the field for 1 CP when King of Eblan was flipped off the top of the deck with Golbez.)  

Though she was a promo card at the time, Rydia was still legal to use in the L3 Format for the Opus X meta, and helped ramp up the deck's value to terrifying levels. Buffing all the Category IV Forwards this deck runs with Rydia's effect is great for putting pressure on your opponent, but it also has the added effect of letting you use Golbez as a huge 10K attacker with Brave and then use the Main Phase 2 to dull him for his effect. 

Using Ashe's effect to reactivate a character lets you abuse Golbez's effect twice per turn as long as you have at least 2 active backups to use. Things also become even scarier if you have both her and the aforementioned Rydia on the field. The second effect you choose almost becomes a moot point, but the draw/discard effect can help filter out any Queen of Eblan's you happen to draw into. 

Oh what was that? You wanted another card that gets buffed by Rydia and gives you a stupid amount of value when flipped off the top of the deck? Yeah, this actually happened a few times over several matches, and since there are so many high-cost cards in this deck, it was pretty much guaranteed to break one of your opponent's Forwards. 

This deck was oddly enough kind of the perfect embodiment of what I was trying to do with these challenges - using cards that haven't seen much play to uncover some interesting combos that might have been overlooked in Standard. 

I'm really hoping to see some unexpected stuff for the second challenge considering what cards you guys chose last time...
 

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🔰Blooming Onions #2🔰

Featured Cards: Onion Knight (III) 

Format: Standard

Requirements: Deck must run all four colors of Onion Knight (III) with a minimum of 8 total, though you may run more. 

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the winners of the community vote last time were the Onion Knight (III) cards, proving either that you guys love janky cards or are just a bunch of suck ups hoping to curry my favor (it worked, in case you were wondering). In any case despite being the job of everybody's favorite bearded loser, the series of four Onion Knight cards released in Opus X are interesting if not only for the fact that they are some of the most thematically accurate cards to their video game counterparts. 

You see in the Final Fantasy III remake for the Nintendo 3DS, the secret to the Onion Knight class is that compared to the other jobs in the game they're almost totally useless until they reach very high levels, where they experience massive stat growth and finally become nigh invincible. So for those of you who didn't get it, the joke is that I'm an Onion Knight who is still as far off from being good at this game as possible. Har har. 

The cards are a pretty good reflection of this, being incredibly weak Forwards that only become powerful with a massive amount of investment both in the deck they're run in and with how you set up your Backups. While it doesn't say so on the card, there's an errata that actually makes meeting their condition for the power boost quite a bit harder as seen below: 

As if it weren't hard enough to get Backups of four different elements onto the field, if at any point you have two Backups of the same color the Onion Knights won't get boosted. This means that you either have to cap yourself at 4 Backups or run a 5th element, including Light or Dark. So that all seems pretty tough just to get a vanilla Forward with 8k power, so why would you bother running these guys in the first place? 

Pros: 

• Once their conditions are met, they're incredibly cheap Forwards for that power level, and have no outright negative drawbacks or maintenance costs like other 1CP Fowards such as Leon 6-063H or Zack 11-007R. 
• Being Job: Standard Units means that they have a ton of cards that can support them. 
• Their low cost and non special character status means that you can easily flood the board with cheap, powerful forwards. 

Cons: 

• As stated above, these guys require a ton of setup to be remotely useful so they're next to impossible to slot into any deck that doesn't revolve around them. 
• All that effort may not really be worth it since they don't really do anything other than being strong attackers/blockers that your opponent probably won't want to trade into. 
• Their hyper-specific Backup color condition means that they could be susceptible to cards like Hecatoncheir 1-117R or Archer 1-088C, leaving you with a bunch of 2k weenies on the field. 

But as they say, nothing worth having ever came easy. These cards may be worth running just for the sheer satisfaction of seeing the look on your opponent's face if you manage to pull off a win with Onion Knights. So just like last time, the idea behind this deck building challenge isn't if you can make a deck that is viable in the competitive meta, but to see what is the best deck that you can make when you have to use these cards. Here are a few different deck ideas I've come up with that can be a good place to start. 

Build Idea 1: FFIII Warrior of Light

Not only is it thematically cohesive to run the named version of the Onion Knights from Final Fantasy III, they have synergy with Standard Unit builds. Luneth helps make the ability to spam Onion Knights so cheaply a lot more threatening if they enter the field with Haste, and Arc can help make any trades or potential removal even more difficult. 

While the Water Refia from Opus II makes Standard Unit Forwards cost 1 CP less, she also has that pesky caveat that they can't become zero which makes her useless for our purposes here. Instead, the Light Refia from Opus X can make setting up your board much easier, searching and playing any of the other 3 Warriors of Light from the Deck. Refia into Ingus is especially good, since he can play a Standard Unit Backup from your hand to get your Onion Knight's color requirement online quicker.

Build Idea 2: FFI Warrior of Light

Much like the FFIII heroes, there are quite a few different versions of the first Warrior of Light from Final Fantasy I that also deal with Standard Units. The strategy with these tend to have more to do with quickly swarming the field with a lot of smaller Standard Units and getting value off of that like Paladin decks in Hearthstone or whatever the Magic: The Gathering equivalent of that deck style would be. 

The 7CP Warrior of Light from Opus X was initially why I wanted to try a different format outside of Standard for Onion Knight decks, since I figured that might be a little too obvious, but the gamble element and dependence on being on Damage 5 for the (admittedly massive) boost might make him a less consistent choice compared to some of the other options. The Wind Warrior of Light is particularly interesting since you'll actually get free CP whenever you play an Onion Knight, leading to some neat shenanigans. 

Build Idea 3: Moogles 

Getting the Backup element requirement is one of the most challenging things about playing an Onion Knight deck, which means that Moogle decks can help streamline things quite nicely. Starter Deck Serah's ability to search for a Moogle on entry and activate any Moogles after attacking makes this an incredibly effective way to spam the board with Onion Knights and keep the CP flowing. The dulling effect is also a nice way to get pesky Forwards out of the way too. 

The Type-0 Moogle backups are also a great way of getting your Onion Knights boosted since they can generate two specific elements - The Water and Wind ones even cover all the colors of the Onion Knights off of only two backups. You can also run the Category XII Moogle backups with Moogle (FFCC) to give the deck more of an element of control while fulfilling the "rainbow" requirement. 

How to Enter 

So once you've cooked up some of that tasty jank, submit your decklist on ffdecks.com and name your deck "Blooming Onions 2" with whatever your deck name is. For example: Blooming Onions 2 - Electric Boogaloo or something like that. Then post the link to the deck in the comments here! 

So this time around I'm looking into setting up an online tournament using these decks, so if you're interested in duking it out Onion Knight style I'm going to announce it shortly down the line via Facebook once I consult with people who are much smarter than me and who actually know what they're doing. Looking forward to seeing these decks in action! 

Vote For The Next Round!

So that's it for this challenge! I'm looking forward to seeing what everybody comes up with for this one, and discovering who's deck will have the dubious honor of being featured in the next Blooming Onions post. For the next round though I'm doing things a little differently though. Instead of specific cards, I wanted the next one of these to focus on archetypes that were an established "thing" at one point, but never really took off due to lack of support. It would be cool to see how these types of decks fare in modern standard formats since it's been a while since any of them have gotten to see the light of day. You can vote for your choice below until June 30th. If you're having trouble seeing the poll on mobile, click here.

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So that's it for this round! Do you guys have any suggestions for cards or archetypes you would like to see in the next one? Let me know what you think! For now, I'll be here trying to figure out how many Onion Knights is too many Onion Knights. 

Until Next Time - Keep on Grinding,