Seattle Crystal Cup Report and Other Recap – Athena's Version
Hi all!
Some of you may know me personally, but many of you also know me as “the GF” from Peter’s previous posts. I’m a little private when it comes to things online, so I’ll henceforth go by my FFXIV character name, Athena. Little background on me: FFTCG is my first card game, and going to any of these competitive events as a first timer is very intimidating. However, the exposure to the environment is great (although my nerves and anxiety still do shake me up), I still have fun playing, and meeting people who also play the game and making new friends is the best part about the game for me.
Since we are just getting back from a major tournament (following a long month of back to back to back weekends of FFTCG LQs or circuit tourneys), I figured I could write a bit on my own experiences at these events as well. Since Peter started this blog, I’ve been meaning to write something and help contribute some content. This is going to be a long one since it will encompass not only Seattle CC but also some snippets of past tourneys leading up to Seattle. If you’d like to stay for the ride, be my guest; otherwise, feel free to skip ahead!
The second LQ went a little differently. I was playing with a newer, improved version of my Scions deck thanks to my friend and mentor. The nerves were still eating away at me all morning. The first 2 matches went south fast; I could see my misplays right after they happened, and the outcomes became very obvious shortly after. Having lost the first 2, I was concerned, and frankly annoyed with myself. Could I come back from 0-2? I tried to brush it off and push on ahead (although Peter and some other friends were wondering if I would really be able to submarine this). Bottom line, at the end of the day, I just wanted to do better than I did at the last LQ, hopefully reach for a spot in the top 16 just so I could get some extra packs, and just enjoy myself more than I did last time. Long story short, after the next 4 matches, I ended up being 4-2—holy Batman, don’t know how I really pulled that submarine off. I was freaking out, and couldn’t really believe I had made it into top 8. This was my first time topping any event. Peter was very proud of me; I was still in shock. As my friends were high-fiving me and patting my back, it felt pretty surreal. Top 8 was huge; I was thrilled to get that far. In my first matchup, I did eventually lose, but actually ended up going 1-2—a loss for me, but it happened in a 3rd round that I didn’t expect to make it to, so that was still worth a gold star in my book. And congrats to my opponent, who did end up taking it all the way to 1st. Overall the second LQ gave me a little boost of confidence; I know it didn't mean that I was instantly great and luck may have been a huge factor, but it still meant I was improving, and that felt pretty good!
It was the first time we were at a major event like this. The idea was to be exposed to it all, meet up with some friends, and just have fun. But, you can't help finding yourself hoping that you do somewhat well. So, when we didn’t, we were pretty hard on ourselves, and whatever confidence we had tried to muster was totally shot. As Peter mentioned, performance completely aside, several other reasons had caused us to think about leaving the game if we ended up not having a good time in Seattle, and unfortunately things were looking a little grim. But, we did want to make the most of our trip in terms of hanging out with people we usually did not have a chance to see, so we tried not to be too glum as we met up with some of the SoCal crew that some friends of ours had insisted we meet.
And I am so, so glad that we did meet them, because we had a blast with them. Saturday night consisted of running around trying to find dinner (our hunger must have blinded us; we walked right past quite a few restaurants without knowing before settling on PF Chang’s), then walking to CVS for a beer/ice-cream/cup noodle run (I was the only one who got cup noodle, but everyone else regretted not getting one after ^.~), and just sitting around drinking and chatting and getting to know each other. Peter and I were feeling the good vibes and it made us feel better about coming back the next day to hang out.
We had a good time on Sunday hanging out with friends from NorCal/SoCal and playing some gunslinger matches in the side events (won some cool Japanese foils!). My Japanese is pretty rusty and I lost to Yamaguchi-san and Arai-san (but hey, won against Kageyama-san in a Scion mirror match!), but I had lots of fun playing these masterminds and seeing the kinds of decks they like to play. It’s just so cool to watch them play, too. You can’t even feel bad losing to these geniuses; you just want to get in line and play again. I wish we had brought more decks to play with against them, though.
Sunday night with the NorCal/SoCal gang was even more fun; some antics at Buffalo Wild Wings, followed by some whiskey and beer and drinks at the hotel while chatting and trolling and trying to keep everyone awake until they left for the airport at 3AM. It’s strange to think that even though we had just met this group of people, we all instantly connected over the game and hung out with each other as close friends for the whole weekend. Not only that, they were incredibly supportive and so friendly and encouraging towards Peter and me despite hardly knowing us, and becoming friends with these people and always making connections like these in the community is my favorite part of playing FFTCG. They really did restore our passion and faith in the game and made us want to keep playing.
Because of them, I look forward to going to future tournaments. Sure, it would be great to play and do well, but even if I don’t, we have all these great people with whom to hang out and have fun! And isn’t that ultimately why we should play—to have fun?
So, I am definitely excited to go to LA at the end of the month for Last Chance Qualifiers. I will be practicing as much as I can, will try to work on some breathing exercises to calm my nerves, and will accept whatever fate awaits me. But! I'll still keep the good vibes going, keep fostering good fellowship, and keep spreading the joy and love of the game. Win or lose, at worst, it will still be an awesome weekend, we will have yet another chance to party it up with all our friends, and probably will troll and make a good handful of new memes of our Boston Crystal Cup Champion. :^)
See you next time! ^^
Some of you may know me personally, but many of you also know me as “the GF” from Peter’s previous posts. I’m a little private when it comes to things online, so I’ll henceforth go by my FFXIV character name, Athena. Little background on me: FFTCG is my first card game, and going to any of these competitive events as a first timer is very intimidating. However, the exposure to the environment is great (although my nerves and anxiety still do shake me up), I still have fun playing, and meeting people who also play the game and making new friends is the best part about the game for me.
Since we are just getting back from a major tournament (following a long month of back to back to back weekends of FFTCG LQs or circuit tourneys), I figured I could write a bit on my own experiences at these events as well. Since Peter started this blog, I’ve been meaning to write something and help contribute some content. This is going to be a long one since it will encompass not only Seattle CC but also some snippets of past tourneys leading up to Seattle. If you’d like to stay for the ride, be my guest; otherwise, feel free to skip ahead!
Some Recap
The local qualifiers and circuit events were pretty far back for me, so I don’t remember much about them (mostly just second LQ). For the past few months, I’ve been playing Scions as my main deck, as I tried some of the other decks but became most comfortable with the FFXIV characters. The first LQ wasn’t great (I think I was pretty much at the bottom of the list when standings went up), but it was good to just participate in it because the air was very clearly different from any of our circuit events—people were out for blood! Although I didn’t do too well, I was happy for a friend who did place 1st at that LQ and got his place at Nationals—celebrated with some scotch and cigars, woot!The second LQ went a little differently. I was playing with a newer, improved version of my Scions deck thanks to my friend and mentor. The nerves were still eating away at me all morning. The first 2 matches went south fast; I could see my misplays right after they happened, and the outcomes became very obvious shortly after. Having lost the first 2, I was concerned, and frankly annoyed with myself. Could I come back from 0-2? I tried to brush it off and push on ahead (although Peter and some other friends were wondering if I would really be able to submarine this). Bottom line, at the end of the day, I just wanted to do better than I did at the last LQ, hopefully reach for a spot in the top 16 just so I could get some extra packs, and just enjoy myself more than I did last time. Long story short, after the next 4 matches, I ended up being 4-2—holy Batman, don’t know how I really pulled that submarine off. I was freaking out, and couldn’t really believe I had made it into top 8. This was my first time topping any event. Peter was very proud of me; I was still in shock. As my friends were high-fiving me and patting my back, it felt pretty surreal. Top 8 was huge; I was thrilled to get that far. In my first matchup, I did eventually lose, but actually ended up going 1-2—a loss for me, but it happened in a 3rd round that I didn’t expect to make it to, so that was still worth a gold star in my book. And congrats to my opponent, who did end up taking it all the way to 1st. Overall the second LQ gave me a little boost of confidence; I know it didn't mean that I was instantly great and luck may have been a huge factor, but it still meant I was improving, and that felt pretty good!
Seattle
Peter’s piece covered a lot of what we did in Seattle outside the tournament, so I’ll try to just fill in parts from my side. My tournament report will be shorter; memory is not as good and only really remember key things, and all these are probably out of order and not exactly what happened...but I tried.Round 1 vs Mid-Range Ice
Ah, I missed playing this deck. It got beaten out of our local meta for a while, but it was bittersweet watching the deck I once loved be used against me to dull and freeze all my Scion forwards. Shiva (x2, wow), you heartless b*tch (JK guys, we all love to hate/hate to love her). And to top it all off, Orphan! The one misplay of the game: if I had used my Ramuh in hand on top of the stack when my opponent played Orphan and dealt 7K damage to one of his forwards (bringing down 1 ice character), his Orphan wouldn’t have frozen my 2 forwards and I might have had a chance. But, sadly, I realized one turn too late, and the game was his. |
| We meet again, old friend... |
(0-1)
Round 2 vs Mono-Fire
So, I know I’ll get some heat (lol) from our local community for losing to fire because of its rep. Looking back, I think I wasn’t aggressive enough and allowed my opponent to swarm the board, and couldn’t recover from the number of forwards that were up against me; not enough to block, and good old Belias killed me off when I did. Three times. (Really?) |
| .....*sigh*..... |
(0-2)
Round 3 vs Fire/Ice
My opponent was very new to the game, so we took it slow and ended up going to time. He eventually conceded since the board state was pretty overwhelming for him at that point (you ever see all 9 of the Scions staring back at you?), but it was a nice and friendly match, and I hope he sticks to the game in the future.(1-2)
Round 4 vs Lightning/Wind
Let’s get this out there now: Zidane is a furry-tailed little a-hole (jk, jk...?). My big misplay (one of them, anyway) here was probably just not playing out my hand when I saw that Zidane, considering he was going to pick at it and throw forwards in the breakzone anyway (trying to remember what was going on in my head, but I may have been trying to prepare myself for a Chaos Walker). I started struggling to draw some forwards. Then, when I finally did get an Y’shtola out, Onion Knight wagged his finger and my opponent used the special and boom, in comes another Onion Knight to finish her off. My poor cat girl never had a chance. And even my 3 EXs in the damage zone (Papalymo, Papalymo, Titan) couldn’t save me. |
| =_= |
(1-3)
Round 5 vs Lightning/Dark
Couldn’t draw any forwards after I got my 4 backups out, but kept drawing monsters so figured those were fine to get out there. My opponent must have thought, “Some nice monsters you have there... Would be a shame if they couldn’t do anything...” right before playing his Emperor out. So that was sitting on the board while I bricked for a few more turns and he swung in again and again for damage. When I finally got rid of the Emperor and popped some monsters off to kill another forward or two, it was too late to recover. |
| @#$%! Lemme do things! |
(1-4)
Round 6 vs Scions (Mirror match~)
My advantage: Alisae turn 1, while my opponent’s went into his damage zone and he struggled to draw another one the rest of the game. Also, I had time to build up enough backups to have the upper hand, while my opponent stayed at 2. I was afraid that as I built up my board, my opponent would play a Shantotto backup, something that everyone playing Earth seemed to be running a 1-of that day. But I guess I got lucky!(2-4)
Round 7 vs Ice/Water
At this point, everyone who was at my table was probably 3-3 and we were all just playing for fun. No-stress environment, and my opponent and I joked back and forth as we played stuff onto the board. I got all my Scion backups out by turn 3 (his face: o_o...) and even the person to his left commented “Whoa, we have a Scion backups party going on over here!” Not gonna lie, feels pretty good when you have them all out. Had a fun match and chatted a bit with my opponent after as we waited for our friends to be done.Final: (3-4)
Well, nowhere close to top cuts; I didn’t even make it onto the first or second page for standings. Before going to Seattle, Peter and I had already tried to brace ourselves for the fact that we would be facing a whole different crowd and meta and may or may not win a place in the top cuts. Someone had tried to pep-talk us and told us not to be disappointed if we lost, since there was only a “1-2% chance” that we would win anyway...which was probably supposed to help, but didn’t at all.It was the first time we were at a major event like this. The idea was to be exposed to it all, meet up with some friends, and just have fun. But, you can't help finding yourself hoping that you do somewhat well. So, when we didn’t, we were pretty hard on ourselves, and whatever confidence we had tried to muster was totally shot. As Peter mentioned, performance completely aside, several other reasons had caused us to think about leaving the game if we ended up not having a good time in Seattle, and unfortunately things were looking a little grim. But, we did want to make the most of our trip in terms of hanging out with people we usually did not have a chance to see, so we tried not to be too glum as we met up with some of the SoCal crew that some friends of ours had insisted we meet.
And I am so, so glad that we did meet them, because we had a blast with them. Saturday night consisted of running around trying to find dinner (our hunger must have blinded us; we walked right past quite a few restaurants without knowing before settling on PF Chang’s), then walking to CVS for a beer/ice-cream/cup noodle run (I was the only one who got cup noodle, but everyone else regretted not getting one after ^.~), and just sitting around drinking and chatting and getting to know each other. Peter and I were feeling the good vibes and it made us feel better about coming back the next day to hang out.
We had a good time on Sunday hanging out with friends from NorCal/SoCal and playing some gunslinger matches in the side events (won some cool Japanese foils!). My Japanese is pretty rusty and I lost to Yamaguchi-san and Arai-san (but hey, won against Kageyama-san in a Scion mirror match!), but I had lots of fun playing these masterminds and seeing the kinds of decks they like to play. It’s just so cool to watch them play, too. You can’t even feel bad losing to these geniuses; you just want to get in line and play again. I wish we had brought more decks to play with against them, though.
Sunday night with the NorCal/SoCal gang was even more fun; some antics at Buffalo Wild Wings, followed by some whiskey and beer and drinks at the hotel while chatting and trolling and trying to keep everyone awake until they left for the airport at 3AM. It’s strange to think that even though we had just met this group of people, we all instantly connected over the game and hung out with each other as close friends for the whole weekend. Not only that, they were incredibly supportive and so friendly and encouraging towards Peter and me despite hardly knowing us, and becoming friends with these people and always making connections like these in the community is my favorite part of playing FFTCG. They really did restore our passion and faith in the game and made us want to keep playing.
Because of them, I look forward to going to future tournaments. Sure, it would be great to play and do well, but even if I don’t, we have all these great people with whom to hang out and have fun! And isn’t that ultimately why we should play—to have fun?
So, I am definitely excited to go to LA at the end of the month for Last Chance Qualifiers. I will be practicing as much as I can, will try to work on some breathing exercises to calm my nerves, and will accept whatever fate awaits me. But! I'll still keep the good vibes going, keep fostering good fellowship, and keep spreading the joy and love of the game. Win or lose, at worst, it will still be an awesome weekend, we will have yet another chance to party it up with all our friends, and probably will troll and make a good handful of new memes of our Boston Crystal Cup Champion. :^)
Special thanks:
- Gina & Jesus: for housing us in your lovely home, hanging out with us before/after, and teaching us how to open/close your door :)
- Boston Crystal Cup Champion: for the autograph :^)
- Seattle Crystal Cup Champion: for signing the tag on the Sephiroth plushie (we're his first autograph!)
- RB: for the demo kits for our friends :)
- Michael & Melissa: for streaming the finals on your laptop...even though it was lagging and real time was 5 feet away XD
- Thomas, Stan, and Laurent: for helping us finally connect with the SoCal group
- NorCal Crew: always nice seeing friendly faces and having pals to chat and de-stress with between matches
- SoCal Crew: you guys are *honestly* awesome! <3
 |
| These are going to be worth a fortune one day... |
See you next time! ^^
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