Dark Lord Tournament Report

Hi all. Max here: friend of Peter and fellow poster on this blog. As a Dark Lord believer since its first spoiler, I put my money where my mouth is and took it to the Opus 6 release tournament for TBZ. I'll briefly cover my thoughts on the card as well as my deck and then go over the tournament games. After, I'll explain how I would change the deck and what I think about Fire's position in the game.

The Card

If you ignore its stipulation, this card looks incredible on the surface. As an 8k for 3 CP, it is ahead of the curve and it has one of the few recurring damage abilities that do not require CP or attacking to activate. The ping damage is enough to smite small forwards such as Vikings or combine with other damage sources (Bomb) to deal with larger threats. The card has it all... except for one issue: it shortens your lifespan in a sense. In essence, the card is great but needs a deck that aims to close the game before milling becomes an issue. While it can easily fit as a 1 of in the deck without causing problems, an ideal deck will be fast enough to win (or lose) before milling after casting it TWICE, as that comes up relatively often.

What Isn't an Issue

One common gripe I see is that people are worried about what will be milled and seem to think that increases deck variance. It doesn't. Just imagine those cards are on the bottom of your deck and you will just finish before you find them, or don't even look at the cards.  ...Actually, you should look at the cards because they provide valuable information determining what outs you shouldn't count on. Basically, it slightly decreases variance. Please note that this does not apply if you have many tutors (searchers) in your deck. If you do, milling tutor targets can be a real problem and Dark Lord becomes noticeably worse.

The Deck

An ideal home for Dark Lord is a deck that is fast and efficiently makes use of ping damage. A typical Lightning package provides these things. Dark Lord turns on cards like Ramuh and Orlandeau and combines with cards like Bomb. Cactuars and Mutsuki were additional ways to turn on the efficient removal. One issue I noticed immediately that I couldn’t correct in time was that the Dark package doesn't fit this deck well, but there are few good fire cards (sorry fire mages!) so I kept it.

The Tournament

Dark Lord took me to an undefeated Swiss record of 5-0 and a loss in the quarterfinals.

Round 1 vs Scions

This round went as I hoped for against a midrange deck. I was able to keep pressure while blowing up forwards as they came. Dark Lord makes Bomb and Ramuh kill anything, and Al-Cid is great as always.

Round 2 also vs Scions

The same as above. These decks operated as tribal decks that couldn't handle losing constituents this quickly.

Round 3 vs Wind /Water Chocobos and Vikings

Special MVPs of this match were the Black Mages that killed Chocobos as they came down and Dark Lord who loves killing Vikings. Dark Lord was about as good as any card could get here. Bombs were useful as a defensive tool to make sure I avoided hasty damage.

Round 4 vs Ice /Wind

To be fair, my opponent had a rough time with mid-game draws here. Typical removal cards dealt with the early creatures and they couldn't handle a large forward force charging in.

Round 5 vs Ice (Midrange)

Most of the game followed a typical game plan of removing their forwards while putting my own out. Value cards like Urianger and Dark Lord were great. At one point, my opponent had an empty hand and no haste creatures so I felt comfortable playing Zodiark to lock up the game.

Quarterfinals vs Scions

These games played much differently than the Round 1 & 2 games. My opponent was able to give all scions haste which put on lots of pressure and prevented much of my Lightning based removal (like Al-Cid). All three games were fun and fair, but they provided insight into a fatal flaw in my deck.

Future Builds

I liked the general game plan and feel like the deck was definitely strong enough to be worth refining but there were a lot of problem cards in it.

The most obvious was the Dark package. Now that I've had more time to consider more cards (the original list was built in a day), finding enough replacements was easy. The Dark cards are strong but they are slow and reduce versatility. They also provide lots of tutors which don't work well with Dark Lord's mill.

Other underperformers were Cactuar where the 1k pings were mostly irrelevant, Orlandeau which required being cast after attack phase with Dark Lord, and the summons Ramuh and Belias which seem good on paper but gameplay never led to them being useful.

Replacements include strong 3CP forwards which tend to combine well with damage, Al-Cid, and Phoenix as well as power reduction cards. By taking out Orlandeau and Ramuh, the deck is freer to explore non-damage-based cards as well as ways to deal with strong forwards protected by Minwu.

My Perspective on Fire

I previously saw Fire as a versatile element that has trouble doing anything particularly well. It was Lightning with weaker cards that don't care about forwards being active.

My view has shifted. While those cards do exist, the ones that deck builders should be looking at are the powerful ones with downside. Fire lets you do incredibly powerful things...at a cost. Dark Lord is possibly the most efficient forward in the game, but requires a fast deck. Bahamut (Opus 6) is an EX and can deal with almost anything for a fair price but requires you to deal more damage than your opponent. Rubicante and Xande are extremely powerful but require a Mono Fire deck. Neo Bahamut is insanely powerful for its CP but requires either you to play out your hand quickly or to juggle with multiple spells on the stack at the same time. These are the kinds of cards that will define Fire in the future.

One last note: when evaluating new cards, don’t consider all with a downside unplayable; just consider how to ignore their restrictions.